Review: ‘You Gotta Believe,’ starring Luke Wilson, Greg Kinnear, Sarah Gadon, Lew Temple, Michael Cash and Etienne Kellici

January 27, 2025

by Carla Hay

Luke Wilson, Michael Cash and Sarah Gadon in “You Gotta Believe” (Photo courtesy of Well Go USA)

“You Gotta Believe”

Directed by Ty Roberts

Culture Representation: Taking place in Fort Worth, Texas, in 2002, the dramatic film “You Gotta Believe” features a predominantly white cast of characters (with a few African Americans, Latinos and Asians) representing the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: A Little League baseball team that’s on a losing streak has to overcome major obstacles in a quest to become a champion team.

Culture Audience: “You Gotta Believe” will appeal mainly to people who are interested in watching formulaic and hokey movies about sports underdogs.

Greg Kinnear in “You Gotta Believe” (Photo courtesy of Well Go USA)

Overly sappy and poorly edited, You Gotta Believe takes real events about an underdog Little League baseball team and turns everything to a mush-filled drama with unimpressive acting. You know how this movie ends before it even starts. “You Gotta Believe” also uses a cancer storyline to over-manipulate people’s emotions.

Directed by Ty Roberts and written by Lane Garrison, “You Gotta Believe” takes place in 2002, in Fort Worth, Texas, where the movie was filmed on location. “You Gotta Believe” is based on a true story, told from the perspective of Robert Ratfliff Jr., whose father Robert “Bobby” Ratliff Sr. was one of the coaches of Robert Jr.’s Little League Team in 2002. Bobby had cancer when he coached the team.

“You Gotta Believe” begins by showing the Westside All-Stars boys baseball team on a losing streak. Klifford “Kliff” Young (played by Patrick Renna)—who owns multiple sports teams (including the Westside All-Stars)—asks attorney Jon Kelly (played by Greg Kinnear) to coach the team for the last game of the season. Kliff says he’s desperate to send a team to a championship tournament. The All-Stars lose their last game, of course.

Meanwhile, insecure Robert Jr. (played by Michael Cash) and his bratty older brother John, nicknamed Peanut (played by Joaquin Roberts), find out that their 49-year-old father Bobby (played by Luke Wilson) has cancer—specifically, an advanced form of melanoma. In this type of “boys club” movie, Bobby’s wife Patti Jean (played by Sarah Gadon) stereotypically has a token role of a woman whose main purpose is to be supportive of the males in her family.

The cancer diagnosis isn’t handled well by the adults who have to break the news to the kids. When Peanut asks Bobby if he’s going to die, Bobby says no, but his body will get weaker. Kids shouldn’t be lied to about death. The correct response would be to tell the truth but in a way that doesn’t cause trauma.

Jon knows about the cancer because he’s Bobby’s attorney, and Bobby has asked Jon to handle the legalities of Bobby’s last will and testament. Jon then asks Bobby to coach the Little League team for the team’s next season. Bobby reluctantly agrees.

Because Bobby misled Robert about how serious the cancer is, Robert tells the team of kids: “He’s not dying. He just has cancer.” Bobby then corrects Robert by commenting to the team about his life expectancy: “The truth is I don’t know.”

Bobby then says they all need to get better. Since when is winning a Little League game as important as surviving cancer? Never. It’s heinous the way that this movie tries to make these two struggles equal.

“You Gotta Believe” then clumsily lumbers along with the expected montages of baseball practices and in-fighting between some of the teammates. Another coach named Mitch Belew (played by Lew Temple) joins team. And he’s a tyrant. And then, yet another coach named Sam Knight (played by Martin Roach) gets added to team.

How many coaches does this Little League team need? It’s not like they’re competing in the Olympics. And what does it say about the decision makers that they didn’t have enough confidence in Bobby that they kept adding other coaches to the team? Don’t expect the movie to explain.

An obvious sign of a bad movie or TV show about a sports team is if only one or two players on the team are given any distinctive personalities. In “You Gotta Believe,” only brothers Peanut and Robert Jr. have personalities that can be distinguished from each other. The other team players are utterly generic.

“You Gotta Believe” is a deluge of corny line after corny line of dialogue. In one scene, Bobby tells the team: “When I was your age, I didn’t have much. But as I grew older, I realized that the most important thing I’ve got is what I give—so give it your all.”

In another scene, Jon’s son Walker Kelly (played by Etienne Kellici), the team’s pitcher, is in the backyard of his home. Walker is being very pessimistic about the team’s chances of making it to the championships. In response, his mother Kathy Kelly (played by Molly Parker) throws Walker in the swimming pool. Kathy then says to Walker in a lecturing tone: “The unexpected can happen—and even you can’t predict that.”

“You Gotta Believe” is the type of movie that spouts a lot of mindless gibberish with the importance of people who think they’re preaching all the answers to life. These are the type of characters who might announce things like, “In other news, water is wet.” They actually don’t say that line in the movie, but “You Gotta Believe” has many moments where viewers might think, “What a stupid and cornball thing to say.”

“You Gotta Believe” isn’t a completely terrible film. Some viewers might enjoy the movie’s cloying and contrived sentimentality or the predictable baseball games. But there are much better movies about “against all odds” Little League teams. (The 1976 comedy “The Bad News Bears” is an obvious example.) “You Gotta Believe” is a movie that wants to hit a home run, but the movie’s substandard filmmaking deserves to stay on the bench.

Well Go USA released “You Gotta Believe” in U.S. cinemas on August 30, 2024. The movie was released on digital an VOD on September 17, 2024. Netflix premiered the movie on January 21, 2025.

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