Amazing Grace And Chuck

Naiveté aside, this improbable story is still a good family film (of which there are all too few). The story centers on 12-year-old Chuck Murdock, a Little League star pitcher who gives up baseball in protest of nuclear weapons. When Amazing Grace Smith, legendary Celtics basketball star reads about it, he does the same. Soon, the entire sports world is rocked by defections. Although the plot is fairly predictable, and the camera lingers too long on Gregory Peck's screen comeback as the President, the film's subtext--the relationship between Chuck and his father--is excellent. As the father, William L. Peterson (who burst onto the scene in To Live and Die in L.A.) brings a three-dimensional character to this otherwise two-dimensional fable. Recommended.