You don’t strictly need to be American to appreciate The Rookie, but it certainly must help: with all the best will in the world, sitting through 128-minute movies about baseball is the sort of thing most sane people will do anything in their power to avoid. Striking a resonant chord with Stateside audiences, however, The Rookie has done well enough to be deemed worthy of a release over here. Bad call, comrades.

Starring the somewhat washed-up figure of Dennis Quaid as a high-school baseball coach whose team’s achievements inspire him to beome the oldest Major League ‘rookie’ of all time, The Rookie is dull and dreary beyond comprehension, and even hardcore fans of the sport are urged to consider what they’re letting themselves in for before attending. It doesn’t help that, aside altogether from its indefensible running time, The Rookie is easily the s-l-o-o-o-w-w-e-s-t film unleashed on Earth in many years, with only Kevin Costner’s latterday output coming close by way of comparison.

Quaid, at the age of 48, seriously seems to think he get away with credibly playing a professional sportsman, and sleepwalks through the whole interminable affair without saying or doing anything of any interest whatsoever, a feat effortlessly replicated by the rest of the cast (including an increasingly repugnant Rachel Griffiths).

Admired for its ‘inspirational’ and ‘heartwarming’ content by the more lifeless among film-critic types, this stinks more rancidly than electoral procedure in Florida, and comes free with renditions of the Star Spangled Banner. You know you want it.