6.5/10
After watching Moneyball, it's really not a surprise to read that so many essential roles (principal actors, screenwriters, the director) were changed and replaced in production. It's a messy movie that lacks the thing it needs most - a singleminded, assured direction. It combines archive footage and recreated scenes awkwardly, a dramatic race to a achieving an MLB record is shoehorned in almost as an afterthought, and intertitles start appearing out of nowhere almost halfway through the movie ("Trade Deadline", etc). Not to mention that many of the scenes collide against eachother almost as skits played one after another, rather than a logical cinematic narrative. And I still didn't get to the inclusion of Billy Beane's daughter, nowhere to be found in the book: Hollywood's lame, cloying attempt at "humanizing" a character who doesn't need it.
All that said, the movie isn't a total loss - it's quite funny at times. Brad Pitt is great, and he has excellent chemistry with Jonah Hill, also very good himself. It's never a chore to watch, even if it does feel overlong at 2.5 hours. Overall though, I think the biggest problem was the movie missing the mark in conveying just how revolutionary Sabremetrics was at the time, and how much of an impact Billy Beane and Paul DePodesta really had on the sport. You couldn't fault someone for coming out of the movie thinking, "so all that and they never really won anything? Who cares?", which is unfortunate.
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