'The Catcher Was A Spy' Trailer: Paul Rudd Gets Dramatic

Paul Rudd tries his hand at drama in The Catcher Was a Spy trailer. Based on a true story, the film finds Rudd playing Moe Berg, a professional baseball player who became a World War II spy.

The week of Paul Rudd movie trailers continues! On the heels of the recent Ant-Man and the Wasp trailer, we now have Rudd appearing in the much more serious The Catcher Was a Spy trailer. Rudd primarily sticks to comedic films – even the Ant-Man movies are more comedy than action – but this looks like a departure.

Rudd is playing Moe Berg, a baseball player who played for several teams, including the Boston Red Sox. Berg was an average player, and primarily used as a backup catcher. But he was also a spy (which you probably could've guessed from the film's title). Per Wikipedia:

As a spy working for the government of the United States, Berg traveled to Yugoslavia to gather intelligence on resistance groups the U.S. government was considering supporting. He was then sent on a mission to Italy, where he interviewed various physicists concerning the German nuclear program. After the war, Berg was occasionally employed by the OSS's successor, the Central Intelligence Agency.

This is a pretty effective trailer. I really like Rudd, and the cast surrounding him here – Mark Strong, Jeff Daniels, Paul Giamatti, Sienna Miller, and Guy Pearce – is impressive. But /Film's Ben Pearson caught The Catcher Was a Spy at Sundance, and said the film was a bit of a drag. As Ben wrote in his review:

71-year-old director Ben Lewin was at Sundance a few years ago with an enjoyable movie called The Sessions that won the Audience Award, but he's hopelessly out of his depth as this movie zig-zags around the globe and tries to recount the details of Berg's classified mission. It's unfortunate, because this is one of those projects that seems like everyone's heart was in the right place, but there's just no energy to it. It's a lot of guys sitting around talking (without saying much of note), broken up by an extended battle sequence in the middle. The dialogue, the long battle scene, the spy elements, a few scenes of Rudd and company playing baseball...they're all fine, but never anything more. The movie just sits there, lethargically going through the motions.

Sounds...disappointing. Still, there's enough talent involved with this film that I'll probably give it a watch when the film hits theaters June 22, 2018.

This gripping, stranger-than-fiction espionage thriller brings to life the incredible true story of Moe Berg, the professional baseball player who became a World War II spy. A Jewish, Princeton-educated, multilingual catcher for the Boston Red Sox with a closely-guarded private life, the enigmatic Berg (Paul Rudd) was already a man of mystery when, in 1944, the US government's wartime intelligence agency enlisted his services. His mission: go behind enemy lines in Europe to assassinate the Nazi's chief nuclear scientist before the Germans develop an atomic bomb. Trading in his catcher's mitt for a trench coat, Berg must rely on his formidable, steel-trap intellect in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse—with the fate of the world hanging in the balance.