In Theaters: “For Love of the Game”

Sam Raimi’s “For Love of the Game” is a baseball movie, which means, like many baseball movies, the film is going to make a hero out of a man while also using the game as a metaphor for life.

But this isn’t just any baseball movie — it’s a baseball movie that stars Kevin Costner, the actor of two previous, hugely successful baseball movies (“Bull Durham,” “Field of Dreams”) whose life seems to parallel that of the character he plays here, Billy Chapel, a 40-year-old pitcher for the Detroit Tigers whose career and personal life have soared into foul territory.

Facing retirement with an arthritic shoulder, Billy is a chump in a slump: His on-and-off girlfriend, Jane (Kelly Preston), is trading him for a new job in London, the team he has been with for 19 years is being sold to corporate America, and now he stands on the mound at Yankee Stadium with thousands of furious New Yorkers screaming for his head on the plate.

What does Billy do with these bases loaded against him? The film answers with a plot that’s part baseball, part sudsy love story, both of which are absolutely predictable.

In this case, the predictability works and that’s because of Costner; no one is better than he is when it comes to conveying what baseball means to this country. It’s our game and Costner is perfect as baseball’s Everyman.

He may have gone too far in honoring his role — throughout the film, his grim face is lined with the heavy weight of respect — but it never feels false. Baseball has been good to Costner. Like Billy, he’s coming to the game for one more terrific hit.

The film does have its wretched moments of cheese, the worst of which stem from its soapy love story, but it’s tolerable because it uses this romance to do what Albert Brooks’ “The Muse” should have done — answer the question of how important a muse is to a person’s success.

Still, what is unforgivable is the film’s insistence on using stock moments to piece together its stock romance (did we really need to see Costner standing in the rain, looking forlorn on the sidewalk, his sad eyes lifted to the illumined bedroom window of Jane’s townhouse?), but Costner might argue it this way: The film is called “For Love of the Game” not “For Love of Jane.”

Grade: B

On Video: “The Matrix”

At the risk of sounding paranoid, it seems that the world as we know it is a hoax, a sham, a glimmering backdrop that exists only to divert us from the ugly truth of what lurks behind the backdrop.

It gets worse. Apparently, we aren’t who we think we are — we’re slaves controlled by an evil, Pentium-crushing computer that runs our lives in ways that would make Ted Kaczynski break into hives.

But before you start bearing signs that read “TheEnd.Is@Near.com,” you should know that all of this unnecessary paranoia is being driven by “The Matrix,” the Wachowski brothers’ $171 million hit that follows their excellent film “Bound.”

Visually stunning and at times genuinely harrowing, “The Matrix” is an idea movie hampered by its ridiculously complex plot. That’s bad news for videophiles, who must pick through the rubble of the film’s literary references, New Age ideas and slang to fully grasp what’s unfolding on-screen, but good news for Keanu Reeves, the film’s star, who’s actually saved by the plot: Indeed, the film’s dense, messy writing diverts attention from his one-note performance.

In the film, Reeves is Neo, a computer hacker-techno-messiah anointed by the modestly named Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) and the leather-clad Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) to help save the remnants of authentic humanity from the Matrix, which, as Morpheus archly puts it, “is the wool that’s been pulled over your eyes to keep you from the truth!”

Morpheus believes that Neo is The One — the only person who can stop the subverted human beings from wreaking more havoc on the world than they already have. Putting Neo through a painful rebirth and a crash course in kung-fu, the pair join forces with others to free mankind by destroying the Matrix.

To reveal more would be as unfair as the film’s ending, which cheapens all that came before it by reducing the film and its ideas to a fantastic fistfight.

Paralleling John Bruno’s “Virus,” “The Matrix” suggests that humans are the real virus destroying earth, yet, like “Virus,” it never fully explores that question. With all of its considerable dogma and rhetoric, the film certainly pretends to be more than entertainment, but it’s ultimately just a poseur, giving itself over time and again to the easier explosion, the cliched gunfight, the clever bit of computer-generated effects.

It should have shot for more.

Grade: C

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear each Monday and Thursday in the NEWS, each Tuesday and Thursday on WLBZ’s “News Center 5:30 Today” and “News Center Tonight,” and each Saturday and Sunday on WCSH’s statewide “Morning Report.”