‘The Hill’ Review: Dennis Quaid in a Flawed but Effective Feel-Good Drama of Faith, Family and Sports

Frank Scheck
·4 min read

It’s long been said that religion and politics don’t mix. But religion and sports, that’s another story, especially at the movies. The Hill, telling the inspirational true-life story of baseball player Rickey Hill — don’t feel ignorant if you haven’t heard of him; most people seeing the film won’t have either — feels perfectly engineered to appeal to both sports fans and religious folk, especially in those parts of the country so quaintly described as “the heartland.” Basically substituting baseball for dancing, the film plays like an updated version of Footloose, with Dennis Quaid replacing John Lithgow as the disapproving pastor.

When we’re first introduced to Rickey, he’s a young boy growing up impoverished in rural Texas, with braces on his legs because of a degenerative spinal disease. That doesn’t stop him from pursuing his deepest love, namely hitting balls with a bat, a skill at which he is incredibly good. Except in his case the balls are rocks and the bats are sticks, since his family, headed by his preacher father James (Quaid), can’t afford proper baseball equipment.

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Not that his father would purchase it for him anyway, since he believes that Rickey is too physically fragile to play baseball and should instead follow in his footsteps as a pastor. Not to mention that he has no use for such ungodly pursuits; when he catches Rickey and his older brother in possession of some baseball cards, he angrily seizes them, telling his children that the cards “sell the worship of false idols.”

If that makes the film sound painfully melodramatic, it’s not. Screenwriters Angelo Pizzo and the late Scott Marshall Smith inject plenty of warmth and humor into the tale, never letting the characters overly succumb to stereotypes. It’s not surprising that the writers know exactly how to (forgive the pun) cover all the bases, since Pizzo wrote such sports films classic as Hoosiers and Rudy and Smith the 2014 inspirational football drama When the Game Stands Tall.

Of course, that doesn’t prevent them from employing plenty of hackneyed dialogue, as when the now 19-year-old Rickey (a perfectly all-American Colin Ford, Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story), desperate to break into the game, tells his father, “When I swing that bat, I ain’t crippled no more. I am David taking down Goliath.” In response, his father tells him that he has to choose between “God’s will or your will.”

Nonetheless, it’s a heartwarming tale of perseverance. Rickey overcomes all obstacles, including an ankle fracture that results in his doctor telling him he’s never going to play again (the doc has obviously never seen movies such as this one) and then surgery that barely leaves him with enough time to recover for a major league tryout supervised by legendary scout Red Murff (Scott Glenn, who’s only gotten more terrifically flinty with age, here reuniting with Quaid 40 years after The Right Stuff). Of course, his family can’t afford the operation, so the whole town pitches in (sorry, another baseball pun) to raise the necessary funds. And in a scene guaranteed to drain tear ducts, Rickey’s plucky grandmother (screen veteran Bonnie Bedelia) assures him on her deathbed that “I’ll be watching” when he plays.

Fortunately, the film also includes enough light-hearted humor to compensate for its corniness. Particularly fun is a scene in which the decrepit family car breaks down right after Rickey’s father has lost his job, with the clan managing to find the comedy in their predicament thanks to their faith and love of each other. Even at his most forbidding, Pastor James makes clear his fierce devotion to his family, including the baseball-playing Rickey, rendering the character likeable despite his sternness. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that Quaid can still prove endlessly charming with that mile-wide grin that first endeared him to audiences decades ago

The Hill proves hard to resist in its warm portrait of the sort of small-town America filled with people rooting for each other (with the exception of the drunken redneck who insists on smoking in church and whom Pastor Mike manages to subdue in a fight despite being considerably older). The film would have benefited from director Jeff Celentano perhaps picking up the pace a little, and the deletion of some extraneous subplots. But the climactic sequence, in which Rickey bats through the pain while encountering the toughest pitchers he’s ever faced, provides the perfect stirring conclusion.

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