The Perfect Game

The plenty of ( plenty of) Small League baseball games packed in to the excessively long film were shot and cut in such haste that you know the small boys cast from "Hannah Montana" and "Wizards of Waverly Place" didn't get much beyond "you throw like a girl" in rehearsals.

The characters in "The Perfect Game" speak old-school Hollywood Mexican - English with accents that they haven't heard since the golden age of Fast Gonzalez.

But for all that and its interminably slow start, "The Perfect Game" has its charms. A fictionalized account of the first Mexican team to win the Small League World Series, it is a classic underdog tale - poor babies from Monterrey who don't have real gear and have never played on real grass molded in to a winning squad by a frustrated former big-league coach (Clifton Collins Jr. of "Capote" and "Star Trek"), with the help of the kindly local parish priest (Cheech Marin).

William Dear, years removed from his one gigantic hit (the 1994 remake of "Angels in the Outfield"), gives style but no tempo to this siesta-speed sports dramedy. The odd engaging moment is always followed by a cloying eye-roller, such as when a new ball appears on the boys' dusty Monterrey sandlot:

"It means God wants us to play baseball!"

"Father, what does it mean?"

Small boys (among them Disney Channel vets Moises Arias of "Hannah Montana" and Jake T. Austin of "Wizards of Waverly Place") wax lyrical over the game "with boundless boundaries."