I saw it Saturday and was happily surprised, since I was sort of skeptical going in. I had been put off by the hip hop tracks in trailers, and thought it might end up being abolutely formulaic/cliched and overdone (see "Red Tails" or similar).. especially the scenes/stories many of us know from Ken Burns' Baseball or books that could have been been ruined by overdoing- Branch Rickey's story from Ohio Weslyan, Reese in Cincy, Bragen and others' petition, etc. However, I thought it portrayed each of these moments/subplots very effectively.
I see where others are coming from, in that it may have been nice to see more of his career.. but that's an entirely different movie, probably with a lot of narration (think Seabiscuit), skipping years at a time, and probably not able to focus on the challenges he faced prior to and during that first season with the any real depth. That said, given how I know I could watch the K Burns series in one sitting if I chose to, I'd have been totally fine sitting a 7 hour epic, broken up into two 3.5 hour parts.
Overall, I'd vote very good (Already wasted my vote on "haven't seen it"), not great but how many sports movies really are "great". Usually it's the emotion and/or sentimentality we baseball lovers feel that make good to very good movies "great" in our minds. And whether great or not, the message in "42" is great, will always be relavent, and needs to be told and re-told forever.
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