Too much of everything

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

The movie takes place before and during WWII, and covers the US government's attempts to infiltrate the Nazi atomic weapon program, and is centered around its protagonist Moe Berg who gets recruited to track down and possibly kill its head scientist Werner Heisenberg. A great cast made this film compelling, though I felt the movie could have benefited from being longer. Also the title is terrible and doesn't do this good movie justice

The Catcher Was a Spy (2018) seems more concerned with making a political statement than a dramatic one, but fails to make a compelling statement of either description. Moe Berg (Paul Rudd) is a man of exceptional intellect and talents: fluent in several languages, a prodigious reader, a chess prodigy, an eidetic, a champion game show contestant (when shows were about knowledge), and a fair-to-middling professional baseball player. He's also a politically correct protagonist. He's bisexual, enabling the producers to appeal to the LGBTQIAPK community, a victim of anti-Semitism, and a pacifist. The outbreak of WWII gives Berg an opportunity to enter the social circles that had previously excluded him, due to his modest finances and Jewish heritage. The OSS needs linguists and Berg is able to leverage his skills into a position as an intelligence analyst, despite his Jewish heritage and sexual orientation. Ultimately, Berg is confronted with a moral decision. His orders are clear. Will he mindlessly obey or will he RESIST? Will he tear open his shirt to reveal a decidedly anachronistic "Hillary for America" T-shirt? His ultimate decision is broadcast well in advance. There is little soul-searching and no decisive actions in the earlier scenes to establish his willingness, commitment, courage or ability to act otherwise. Consequently, the film offers no compelling moral, political statement, ethical quandary or dramatic experience. Paul Rudd delivers a credible performance as a sexually ambivalent intellectual. Guy Pierce sheds his accent to sound like an authentic American. Paul Giamatti is credible as a German Jew. The settings, costumes and props seem authentic. Production values are solid. However, excessive reliance on jiggly-cam shots constantly disrupt the audience's willful suspension of disbelief, reminding them that they are viewing the action through a hand-held camera. The title could be stronger. Berg doesn't engage in officially-sanctioned espionage activities while engaged as a ball player, although he voluntarily collects some information and gives it to an intelligence officer. It's not really an action film, although there is a battle scene. It isn't very suspenseful. There isn't nearly as much intelligence gathering and analysis as there is in Spy Game or Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Part of the problem is that Berg never confronts an enemy, much less fight his way through a hierarchy of increasingly capable and dangerous adversaries to a final one-on-one conflict. There are Nazis out there, somewhere, and they're trying to build a weapon of mass destruction. Although no coherent parallels are drawn to Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong-Un, some doubt they pose an immediate risk of success. The film is watchable but not exciting, rewarding or cathartic. The end titles, which attempt to justify Berg's choice, serve as mute testament to the film's failure to convey a complete story. In real life, Berg was given an additional assignment by the CIA, but provided no valuable intelligence. He lived out his twilight years in obscurity as an affable mooch.

This is a long title for a movie, and it quite explains everything,the catcher which is American of course converted to be a spy for the Office of Strategic Services "which was been told as OSS repeatedly throughout the movie and i had to google it".So it's about a spy whose mission is to kill a German physicist to prevent him from developing the atomic bomb, or to just walk away if he found that he is not close to making it.The acting , the directing, the timeline , the music, the backwards & forwards style of storytelling, the beautiful background scenes of 30's, all of those are good point in the movie, other than that would be the costumes which i didn't find them remarkable nor the silly hair styling and fake looking wigs of some of the characters.The movie has a problem that it didn't give me enough background about our spy to justify his actions, like: Why did he even volunteer to the OSS ? How did he learn all those languages ? Why did he have the motive to not to kill the scientist ? How did he get all his degrees in spite of his busy time playing baseball ?The sexuality of "Moe Berg" is questionable in the movie and it was emphasised on which i find it unnecessary.Finally it's an average spy movie which follow a very steady rhythm without any special events, so action and suspense is not expected here, and you may feel a little bit bored.

Ben Lewin has brought Nicholas Dawidoff 1994 biography about the mysterious Moe Berg. And Moe Berg remained a mystery until he died. Here's food for thought: when you think of Jews in baseball Moe Berg's name doesn't easily come to mind. Hank Grrenberg, yes. Sandy Kofax, for sure. Not Moe Berg who played for the Boston Red Sox during the 20s and the 30s. 'The Catcher was a Spy' is a conventional film with a fascinating 'hero': a polyglot, a polymath, born of Eastern Europeans Jews who settled in Harlem. And yet, Berg, played by a charming Paul Rudd who like his character celebrates tight lip secrecy. It is to Rudd's credit to have learned smatterings of six or seven languages to give body to his character who know many, many more. Berg graduated summa laude from Princeton when few Jews could attend. A lawyer from Columbia law who passed the bar before he finished his degree. Yet baseball was his life as was spying. The script writers give short shift to the spy Berg when he went to Japan with an all-star team that included Babe Ruth. We get the idea Berg dresses up as a Japanese in full kimono, armed with a camera films from the roof of a hospital Tokyo Harbor which had a dual use as a military facility. It would have taken too much to explain the prewar politics and the role of Japan invading Manchuria, testing America's and European empires' turf in Asia. So, although Berg was acting on behalf of a rudimentary US spy agency, Lewin's script white washes it as an act of a patriot. There is a 'love' story, but beneath the surface the film there is a flaw, a 'moral flaw' for the time. Was Berg queer? Probably. A scene of a night visit to the waterfront frequented by men, and non reputable bars frequented soley by men. Now to the film: Wild Bill Donovan, founder of the OSS, predecessor to the CIA, recruits Berg after Pearl Harbor. Donovan asks him if he's queer. And without a beat, Rudd replies, 'I know how to keep secrets'; to which Donovan replies, I don't care wo a man f--ks, I'm only interested if he's wants us to win the war'. Berg's assignment is to kill Werner Heisenberg, father of the German nuclear bomb. And here the film takes wings...and a high moment of the 'Catcher was a Spy' is when Rudd and Strong play mental chess, to fathom have the Germans the bomb. And here we see Berg has a dialectical frame of mind, he's willing to spare Heisenberg for an answer that Germany's nuclear project is not very advanced. (Heisenberg is the object of an award winning play "Copenhagen' that infers Heisenberg purposefully delayed Hitler's plans for a nuclear weapon.) The camera turns all over the place Japan, Italy, New York and Switzerland. Long shots, close shots, it runs the full alphabet of film making. Rudd speaks his languages fairly well with a good accent, but slips briefly when it comes to French. There is nothing dramatically wrong, but the film never plumbs the secretive Moe Berg. At the end we are told Berg never married and spent time in libraries. And yet he never left the CIAin mind and spirit and died the loner he was.