The Catcher Was a Spy is the upcoming biographical war drama from director Ben Lewin (The Sessions, Georgia), with a script by Robert Rodat (Saving Private Ryan), that’s based on the 1994 biography ‘The Catcher Was A Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg’ by Nicholas Dawidoff. Berg was a professional baseball player who was recruited into the OSS during WWII as a spy, where he was tasked with investigating the German nuclear program.
Paul Rudd heads up the all-star cast as Moe Berg, which also includes Jeff Daniels, Mark Strong, Sienna Miller, Connie Nielsen, Guy Pearce, Paul Giamatti, Hiroyuki Sanada, Shea Whigham, and Tom Wilkinson. A very impressive cast indeed.
The official plot synopsis is as follows:
[quotes quotes_style=”bquotes” quotes_pos=”center”]This gripping, stranger-than-fiction espionage thriller brings to life the incredible true story of Moe Berg, the professional baseball player who became a World War II spy. A Jewish, Princeton-educated, multilingual catcher for the Boston Red Sox with a closely-guarded private life, the enigmatic Berg (Paul Rudd) was already a man of mystery when, in 1944, the US government’s wartime intelligence agency enlisted his services.
His mission: go behind enemy lines in Europe to assassinate the Nazi’s chief nuclear scientist before the Germans develop an atomic bomb. Trading in his catcher’s mitt for a trench coat, Berg must rely on his formidable, steel-trap intellect in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse—with the fate of the world hanging in the balance.[/quotes]
The movie’s received fairly average reviews following its screening at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, but I’ve developed a liking for Paul Rudd following his turns in Ant-Man and Mute so let’s see what he’s got for us here:
Well if the trailer is anything to go by the only thing that looks really bad here is Mark Strong’s wig. This comes across as a character study wrapped up inside of a World War II spy story, which unfortunately seems fairly predictable in the way it’ll play out. The strong cast offsets that predictability somewhat because good actors can do quite a bit with weak material, but even with that this doesn’t look much more than… alright.
What do you think? The Catcher Was a Spy is due for release in the US in theatres and via VOD on 22 June.
