It’s taken a long time to get Kevin Costner taken down a peg, but it was worth the wait. After Waterworld bombed, it would have been fair to hope we’d seen the last of Costner’s bloated vanity projects, but then came the similarly dreadful The Postman, which, not surprisingly, bombed as well. Now Costner is back, but — finally — humbled, at least by his standards. After playing a second lead in the modest Message in a Bottle, Costner’s back in the undisputed lead role, but he’s not playing a messiah this time. For Love of the Game has a dual purpose: It aims both to acknowledge Costner’s vulnerability and build him back up to star status. It’s abjection as career rehab.

In For Love of the Game, Costner is Billy Chapel, a major league baseball pitcher at the end of a long and brilliant career. He has "a room reserved at Cooperstown," but all Chapel can think about is that he’s 40 years old and rarely finishes a game. With a shoulder that’s ached for a decade and a nearly career-ending injury to his pitching hand, he’s an old war horse, battered and scarred but still fighting.

If that last sentence seems full of clichés, it’s nothing compared to For Love of the Game, which, like many sports movies, uses the florid prose of sports announcers to add drama to the proceedings. As Chapel, a Detroit Tiger, takes the mound against the dreaded Yankees in For Love’s first reel, it’s clear he has a date with destiny. Why, one of the announcers even says so. Not only that, but "he’s pitching against time — against ending."

Weighty stuff, of course, but the stuff of which baseball movies are made. Baseball is, after all, The Game, and you can hear those capital letters go off every time a character says the words. As someone who’s watched perhaps a dozen complete ballgames in his entire life (not counting the grim, distant memory of Little League), I couldn’t care less about the actual sport, but damned if baseball movies don’t work their magic anyway. Who doesn’t feel a twinge when the movies invoke the dying pride of a once-noble game that has given way to corporate tie-ins and prima donna posturing? Whose heart doesn’t stir at the thought of bottom of the ninth, bases loaded, two outs and down by three?

Since its main character is a pitcher, that’s not how For Love of the Game ends, but it’s close. As the film goes on, Chapel gets closer and closer to that rarest of baseball’s rare birds: the perfect game. (Those omnipresent announcers helpfully clue us in, although real announcers are forbidden by superstition from mentioning a perfect game in progress.) But Billy Chapel’s got a lot on his mind: He’s just found out the team’s been sold and he’s likely to be traded (to the Giants, natch), and, if that weren’t enough, Chapel’s girlfriend, Jane (Kelly Preston), has just announced she’s leaving him, and is on her way to the airport as he steps onto the field.

For Love of the Game is structured as a series of flashbacks, triggered as Chapel thinks back from the Yankee Stadium dugout, and the message couldn’t be clearer if one of those meddlesome announcers spelled it out: His whole life has led up to this moment. It may take a while to figure out the structure, since the flashbacks are so poorly executed: There’s no consistent cue to let us know we’re slipping into the past, and not even every scene in a ballpark is set in the present day. Such structural mechanics are usually director Sam Raimi’s forte, but then numerous reports in trade papers had Costner forcing the studio to use his own cut of the movie, despite the fact that it tested lower than Raimi’s.

We may never know exactly whose cut For Love of the Game ended up being, but the film does have the deliberate, leaden pacing of Costner-directed slush, and little of Raimi’s whiz-bang velocity. But then after A Simple Plan, who knows what Raimi’s style is anymore? After years of aggressively anti-mythic filmmaking — remember his un-Western Quick and the Dead? — Raimi has spun on his heel with dizzying force. In For Love of the Game, there’s nothing but myth. Billy Chapel may be pitching against time, and against ending, but he rarely seems to be pitching against the New York Yankees. Where Bull Durham — still Costner’s only complete performance — gained strength from its attention to the grungy details of minor league ball, For Love makes only the most generic of references to its setting. Apart from the best-buddy catcher role (filled by John C. Reilly), the other members of the team Billy Chapel’s been a part of for 18 years barely appear onscreen. As Jane tells him during their teary breakup: "You and the ball and the diamond, you’re perfect.… You can win or lose the game all on your own." With no other visible players, he’d have to go it alone.

Although its generic mythmaking makes For Love generally intolerable, it paradoxically makes Costner look better. For once, his ego’s not the biggest thing on the screen: The Game is. The camera often lingers too long on his leathery, impassive face — if ever there was an actor not made for reaction shots, it’s Costner — but there’s one fine scene where a downcast Chapel, half-naked in the locker room, looks wistfully at his own body and sadly pinches the flab at his waistline. (Although since when did pitchers worry about getting fat?) It’s possible to read too much into that moment, but considering Costner’s recent career, it seems inescapably like a mea culpa. You can almost picture Costner thinking, "Goddamn, I didn’t used to be a joke. What happened?"

Such feet-of-clay humility might have worked if Costner had the mythic resonance of a Gary Cooper or even a John Wayne, if he were an icon going to seed playing an icon going to seed. But Costner’s never had true all-American status; this is the guy Madonna laughed at in Truth or Dare. The script, by Dana Stevens of Blink and City of Angels fame, tries to revive the spirit of a long-dead genre, meaning it’s full of howlers like "I’m sorry about what I said to you that day at the condo" and "The boys are all here for you." But with his SoCal diction and lanky limbs, Costner’s too ordinary to play the Man on the Mount. What Costner’s really trying to do is to reverse the process; if he plays a faded giant, he must once have been a giant. But the bigger For Love of the Game gets, the smaller he looks.

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