'Trouble with the Curve' - Movie Review

Clint Eastwood is Atlanta Braves talent scout Gus Lobel. Amy Adams is his hard-working lawyer daughter Mickey. Gus is having trouble with his eyesight (Macular degeneration, but he's not willing to talk about it). Gus's friend and co-worker (boss?) Pete Klein (John Goodman) manages to convince Mickey to go on the road with her father, despite the strained relationship between father and daughter, despite her not wanting to be there and him not wanting her there. They encounter former player Johnny Flanagan (Justin Timberlake) that Gus had scouted, now himself a scout. He's very taken with Mickey, and they bond over baseball while she struggles with her father and the possibility of losing a partnership in her law firm that may or may not be offered to her.

My primary problem with the movie is that Eastwood is playing the same grumpy-old-man role he's played before: this is a small variation on Walt Kowalski, the character he played in "Gran Torino." He's reasonably good at it, but the sense of deja vu was strong. In fact ... if you put Walt Kowalski into Disney's "Million Dollar Arm," this is the movie you'd get out the other end ... except "Million Dollar Arm" may have been better written. In the end, Adams and Timberlake get big enough roles to pull the movie up to something worth watching and reasonably enjoyable, although it still feels predictable.