Un ticket pour le paradis

This is the best new baseball movie I've seen in ages,Big (Tom Hanks) crossed with Field of Dreams and 8 Men Out....The reproduction of the way life was turn of the century Pittsburgh was excellent and looked as real as if you were there...The actors who were cast as the ball players & especially the portrayal of Honus Wagner by Matthew Modine and Ty Cobb by William Lee Scott were incredible....The movie has a feel good ending,a kid overcoming adversity on the ball field,problems at home with his family,discovering he's grown up & gone back in time,a little love story for the ladies,this movie just absolutely has it all!!!!!A Great movie for the entire family.....

The direction on this TBS TV movie is good, the performances are fine, the photography is handsome and interesting, but the script is a bit of a muddled mess. Nominally about life lessons and the importance of following your dreams, the movie turns into a rather mushy and ill-defined wish-fulfillment fantasy all around.

Joe's family is suffering through a bout of poverty when he comes across a rare baseball card of Honus Wagner worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the card does not solve his family's financial problems. Instead it sends him back to the 1909 World Series where he meets Wagner, and makes him several years older. Then later, after it appears to have all been a dream, it works further, concrete magic. This is a problem with ill-defined fantasy: if it can do anything, then it fails to keep the story's allegorical sense straight.

The script is a bit better at hinting at the complexities of life as a professional ballplayer in the era that saw Wagner and Ty Cobb square off against each other in the World Series, but the main story is a bit random. Perhaps the novel it was drawn from simply had too many subplots for the screenwriter to handle elegantly.

The premise of the film was promising and the performances were engaging, but the script was a confusing mess. A baseball card makes the main character travel back in time - okay, we'll go with it - but why does the character also become older? There is no reason for this except for the fact that he has to impersonate Honus Wagner on the field late in the film, which is totally unbelievable whatever his age.

Then at the end the card lets an old woman return to be with Wagner, her one true love. Is she travelling back in time or merely joining him in some spiritual ghost world? By that time it's hard to care.

THe film was overly sentimental and over dramatic. Moreover, in spite of the lavish attention to period baseball with the appearance of CGI stadiums along with period uniforms and gloves, it seems to me that they failed to understand a simple fact of baseball. In the final game of the World Series, played in Detroit, the main character, Joe, runs out on the field to play defense for the visiting Pittsburgh Pirates to start the game. The visiting team always bats first and the home team takes the field first. A gross error of judgment. I also agree with the other poster about the huge numbers of homers and long balls being out of place in the game of that era.

I just want to say that I love this movie. But I also want to say that it's a movie not be taken seriously. It's a fantasy. It's a baseball fantasy. Just like "Field of Dreams." As a pseudo baseball historian, I appreciate the details given to the baseball uniforms, the player's gloves and catcher's equipment and both team's stadiums. I also like how the stadiums were depicted in a neighborhood setting with the surrounding industries, which in 1909, they were. I admit that the movie does try to convey a message that takes awhile to get across. But once it does, it all makes sense and it makes you smile if you can forgive the historical inaccuracies.

This movie won't go down in history as a all-time great, but it will always be one of my favorites.