This feel-good family film tells the story of Roger Bomman, (Joseph Gordon-Leavit) a boy who has been placed in foster care by his shiftless widowed father (Dermot Mulroney). Roger has been living in Maggie’s foster care home for a number of months, all the time holding on to the hope that his father will come get him, but when his father does come, it’s to tell him that he will be given over to the state permanently. His dad just can’t get it together enough to take care of him. When Roger asks, “When will we be a family again?” his dad replies, “When the Angels win the pennant.”
The Angels are Roger’s favorite baseball team, but they’ve been on a really long losing streak. Roger’s dad was trying to tell him that they would never be together again, but Roger misunderstood. If the Angels could just win the pennant, his dad would come back for him, or so he thinks. That night, Roger says a prayer and asks God to help the Angels win. The next day is Kids Day at the stadium, and while Roger is watching the game, he sees that his prayers have been answered – angels swoop down from the sky and help out the players. But he’s the only one who can see them.
Al is the “boss angel.” Played by Christopher Lloyd, he’s a little bit spastic (but what else would we expect from Christopher Lloyd?) He explains to Roger that the angels have come to help out the team in answer to prayer. Roger can hardly believe it, but all day long, angels appear, helping hit home runs and to catch balls. It’s great!
Later, Roger has the chance to have his picture taken with grumpy Angels manager George Knox (Danny Glover). He mentions what he saw to George, and George can’t believe what he’s hearing. But when George watches the playback of the game, he can see that the players were performing well beyond their usual abilities, and so he hunts Roger down and asks him more about the angels.
From that time on, Roger and his friend JP, also a foster child at Maggie’s, are invited to every game. Roger tells George when he sees an angel, and that helps George to know which players to put in – if an angel is rubbing a player’s shoulders, he’s the one who should go in. The Angels start winning games left and right, and in the meantime, other miraculous things happen as well. George stops his swearing and gets the other guys on the team to cut it out too, and they all start pulling together instead of fighting all the time. As the season progresses, the angels are having to help out less and less as the team improves.
The ending of the movie is pretty predictable, as is the whole film, but that doesn’t make it any less fun. There is some language at the beginning, but that gets cleaned up as Roger tells George that the angels don’t like it. I enjoyed the story quite a bit.
Interesting side note: You’ll see a really young Matthew McConaughey as one of the ball players.
This film is rated PG.
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