'Summer Catch' drops the ball

In each of his most recent movies, Freddie Prinze Jr. plays a successful yet confused guy who falls in love with a girl whose free-spirited and unique personality is shoved down movie-goers' throats. The couple always falls in love, cavorts, breaks up over something stupid and ultimately gets back together because of Prinze's character proclaiming his undying affection in some public or embarrassing way.\nWell, in the brand-new "Summer Catch," Prinze attempts to become a three-dimensional actor, to prove his talents and hopefully, to score a hit he hasn't had since "She's All That." To do this, he makes a daring decision: he plays the same character as described above -- but this time he does it with an exaggerated Boston accent. Said accent is, as you might have guessed, less than authentic, but the unintentional laughs it provides at least compensate for the unachieved "humor" and "romance" the film is advertised to provide.\nSet in scenic Chatham, Mass., Prinze plays Ryan Dunne, a blue-collar college dropout who spends most of his time drinking beer and mowing lawns as part of his father's landscaping business. His last chance to play Major League Baseball comes when he is called up to play in the Cape Cod summer baseball league, where, as the movie tells us, all the big league scouts come to recruit top college players.\nThe biggest conflict for a viewer watching this film is deciding what parts are more painful to watch. It could be the scenes depicting Ryan and his lecherous teammates bonding. Not only are most of the actors playing the baseball players even worse actors than Prinze, but the script saddles them with subplots ranging from ridiculous to downright offensive. For example, one of the players on Ryan's team has a thing for voluptuous women, providing the whole movie with fat jokes.\nMaybe that's because the so-called "fat girlfriend" character exhibits a lot more acting skill than skinny Jessica Biel, who plays Prinze's rich-girl love interest, the absurdly named Tenley Parrish. In fact, the only two bright spots in the movie are Matthew Lillard (who must purposely take parts in awful movies in order to be called the "bright spot" of any movie) as one of the ballplayers and Zena Gray as Tenley's little sister, who spends the movie trying to find a mascot for Ryan's fictional ball team.\nAs you can probably guess, the appropriate mascot for "Summer Catch," the film is this big ticking bomb.