Author Nick Hornby and the Farrelly directors make a strange combination. Each has a very different style of storytelling (About a Boy and Dumb and Dumber, respectively) and each is generally successful it its own way. But the two together make a strange looking child.

While I have not read Hornby’s Fever Pitch or seen the original 97 version, this is by far the most lighthearted Hornby adaptation, and the most serious Farrelly comedy to date. It works on the surface. It’s a standard romantic comedy about Ben, an obsessed Red Sox fan, (Jimmy Fallon) and Lindsey, the girl who comes to love him in spite of it (Drew Barrymore).

But it hardly feels like a Hornby story. Ben is a Hornby character on the outside – he’s a full grown adult who can’t maintain a relationship because he’s still a child in certain ways. But he feels too watered down, too silly, too Farrelly-esque to be anything real. Similarly, the structure and dialogue include flashes of Hornby grace, but only in the midst of cliché scenarios and stupid jokes.

I like the sports story about a fan instead of the players. It’s rarely done, and it actually, strangely, feels like a truer sports movie by coming from a fan’s perspective. And the way in which the Red Sox 2004 season, so close behind us, was cleverly woven into the story was a lot of fun.

At the same time, Fever Pitch runs into serious problems with its sports storyline – and I’m not talking about the fact that they had to rewrite the film’s ending when the Red Sox actually won the series last fall. But following the Red Sox is a major part of Ben’s life, such that he’s an entirely different person in the summer than in the winter. As the film clearly establishes, it is going to be impossible for him to maintain his current level of obsession AND a healthy relationship with Lindsey. And yet the film tries to cheat and have it both ways. It doesn’t work. This is a film about making compromises, but it refuses to make any compromises in the end. That doesn’t cut it.

Plus, it makes fun of the Royals.