Although painstakingly reconstructed by writer-director John Sayles, this ends up as a dullish depiction of baseball's biggest scandal - the 'fix' of the world series by the Chicago White Sox in 1919. Underpaid by their money-grabbing manager, who welshed on every promise, the ringleaders were easy prey for the gamblers and mobsters who brought financial incentive to bear, then proved just as unreliable as the players' bosses when it came to paying up. Some good actors, notably John Cusack, D B Sweeney, Charlie Sheen, David Strathairn and Michael Lerner as crime kingpin Arnold Rothstein couldn't be bettered. But Sayles' treatment is far too slow and cries out for editing down by 15 or 20 minutes. Such action as there is is confined to the baseball field and won't mean much to non-American audiences. The period is observed to the last detail, although the dialogue ('Way to go, Joe! ') strikes a few anachronistic notes.

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