If you're watching this as a biography, you're in the wrong theater! The Babe is just a great story based on a great baseball player. It has some inaccuracies, that's true, but Goodman pulls off a performance equal to or better than the best of character actors!Goodman was born to play the Babe and while it's a bit over the top, he captures the cadence and presence of that time in America...This movie was made in 92. It was a totally different America; we still went to the theaters in droves. The internet was still a decade from exploding...Nobody had cell phones...This movie was panned in that era because there was lots of competition and the schmaltzy Hollywood fare was put on the back burner for movies like Stroker's Dracula, Reservoir Dogs, Last of the Mohicans, A few Good Men, etc...In that class, Babe is sitting the bench! This recently watched movie made me appreciate the life work of J. Goodman and his larger than life screen presence... Sit back and choose your poison...A very entertaining movie!

Seeing this for the first time in 2011 I find it has two strikes on it; 1) the story begins in 1902 and ends in the mid 1930s when Ruth's glory days - mostly the teens and twenties - are well behind him and 2) I am English and although I have read widely about baseball my eras of choice are the forties and fifties and I know -albeit at second hand - far more about Jackie Robinson, Ted Williams and even Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio than about Ruth so I have to more or less take it on trust and allow for the fact that it is Hollywood and by definition will move from the facts as and when it suits the producers. Having said that this is a very engaging film with a fine central performance and now that I own it on DVD I'll probably watch it again.

As a work of fiction, I suppose this picture could have some entertainment value. As a biopic, it should have some historical validity vis a vis the facts as they are known. There were so many (countless actually) errors in dealing with the onset of Babe Ruth's baseball career that the whole exercise must be challenged. If the screenwriter is loose and fast with basic information about the athlete's career on the field, why should the viewer accept any elements of the story regarding his life off it? The whole story lost credibility in my eyes from the start and it wasn't long before I lost interest in the movie entirely.This is a waste of celluloid.

I found this movie to be appallingly bad. The actually story of Babe Ruth is fascinating, but the movie treats him as the same caricature that popular memory has created. Goodman's portrayal is shallow and treads on parody. He does manage to copy the voice of the Babe fairly well, but that only picks up about an hour into the film. Facts are disregarded throughout the story and confusing leaps through time distort his career.Not for baseball fans, not for history fans, not for movie fans. The only people who might enjoy this are Red Sox fans, as the whole two hours does a great injustice to the most famous Yankee of them all.