Welcome to Tubi Tuesday. An ongoing experiment where we dig into some of the weird, underrated, and downright abysmal movies we don’t think our real life friends would let us talk at length about. At the time of writing, this movie is streaming for free on Tubi, the home of Super Bowl LIX!
Major spoilers for Mr. Go ahead, so make sure you don’t read further until you go watch the nearly 2.5 hour gorilla sports epic yourself. What? You aren’t going to? You have no interest in that? We aren’t compatible as friends but read on I guess.
Baseball movies have never been overly concerned with adhering to every rule within the sport. I mean, we all know there are rules in real life that stop professional athletes from falling in love (it’s why Tom Brady had to get divorced to go back to the NFL) but if movies acknowledged that rule we would lose like six Kevin Costner movies.
And let me clarify, I believe many sports films are better when they don’t slog themselves down with rule fetishism or hyper realism and instead focus on mixing the hyperbolized narrative storytelling of movies with the real life “moments” and “stories” that really only comes from sports. So with all that said, I think I would argue the majority of Mr. Go, which follows a baseball crushing circus gorilla as he plays in the Korean Baseball Organization for the Doosan Bears, does not get bogged down by sports realism.
There are quite a handful of (debatable) rule violations that occur during the big montage where the title character, a gorilla playing designated hitter, becomes an overnight sensation by hitting 18 straight home runs. Mr. Go repeatedly leaves the base path, hits multiple balls after stepping out of the batters box, and even hits one home run via golf swing off a pitch that was rolled in by the pitcher. Add on the moment where he blatantly shoves the third basemen for the Hanwha Eagles out of his way on an inside the park homer, and there’s enough rule transgressions to really suck a baseball purist out of the movie.
If you ask me, a genius, these moments aren’t to be dwelled on. I didn’t watch a movie about the best fictional batter in Korean baseball history to get pedantic about whether or not 4 of his 20+ homers counted.
So where is the line?
The line is when the movie itself decides to rest the fate of its climax on the rules. The finale of the film takes place when our Bears are down by three to the NC Dinos, mostly due to the Dinos new star pitcher Zero, a gorilla from the same circus as Mr. Go. The Bears have the bases loaded in the ninth with two outs, and their star batter is up.
After putting two strikes on Go, Zero launches a monster fastball and Go finally makes contact. The insane speed meeting the immense power is ultimately too much for both objects, causing the ball and the bat to explode into a hundred pieces on impact, thus creating the films most memorable visual moment, as well as its most unrealistic.
Seconds after the collision, no one on the field knows what to do. Surely the umpire will call a dead ball and rule it foul? The managers of both teams rush to their rulebooks, flipping haphazardly through the pages of regulations. Almost in tandem, they land on the ruling. The fielding team must gather all the pieces of the ball to make the out. Duh.
Then ensues the chaos that is a whole baseball team scrambling to gather pieces of the ball as a gorilla sprints around the bases. The culmination is a home plate play that results in the catcher for the dinos tagging Go before he touches home plate with a glove full of baseball pieces. A sad, dramatic, slice of life ending to this story. Or at least it would be, if the rules mattered.
As the Dinos begin calling themselves winners, the umpire finds one single piece of ball left lying in the infield. Therefore, they don’t have all the pieces, and Go is safe at home. Everyone goes home happy. Everyone except any filmgoer whose suspension of belief for this gorilla baseball movie only goes so far.
Every Major League Baseball fan knows that the ruling on a shattered ball is that play may continue as long as the fielder has the majority of the ball. The majority. This rule clearly means Go should have been out and this game should have been heading to extra innings, if not over altogether due to an earlier tag that easily could have been done if the team had not been fed misinformation.
Allowing the rules to be malleable in exchange for cinematic showmanship is fine, but having two on-screen characters flip through rulebooks right in front of our faces, only for them to shout out a screenwriter’s fictitious ruling, is an insult to those of us who care about the integrity of Korean Baseball League.
What would the KBO have looked like if the right call had been made? Would the Dinos have been champions? Would Zero have been signed to massive hero contract? He certainly would have been less likely to go on the full stadium rampage that he goes on after the game. Makes you think…
Creating legends of sports is exactly what I want from a movie like Mr. Go, but that legend status means nothing if I can’t insert the character into the real world that I know. Without taking the care to apply the baseball of the real world to the film, I am starting to feel like Mr. Go is just a made-up gorilla playing baseball in a movie.