Typical Ron Howard commercial crowd pleaser

Rating: 6/10 (13 June 2005)

Ron Howard makes the most commercial, feel good, crowd pleasing movies of today. That does not mean that they are the most thoughtful, insightful, expert, soulful, or innovative, but just that they are well crafted, basic and timeless morality tales that will be just as watchable 20 or 30 years down the road, as our hard wired human nature doesn't change enough in order to make his films outdated in that short time. His films are like "The Wizard of Oz" in their simple old fashioned morality that we quietly love but won't admit to anyone, and just as timeless. That is Cinderella Man in a nutshell.
However, I can only stomach about one of his sugary films every few years, and am thankful that it takes him about that long to get another one out. Cinderella Man showed Braddock as a saint worthy of being selected the next pope, not a real man with faults, and even if it was a good tale it still hit that spot in me that yells, "no way!" History shows Braddock to have been a decent man and very tough fighter, but he had many well documented human failings that were not shown at all in the film. And the many shots of long wet kisses and fond caresses with his always responsive wife.....hot married romance with 3 starving kids and no food or heat or money?.......again, "are you kidding?"! But the gals just eat this kind of phony stuff up and add greatly to ticket sales.
My main concern was the same as with all phonied-up Hollywood films of today...the human body just realistically can't take anything near the brutal punishment these films show it can.... innumerable full force head punches, bomb explosions, hundreds of bullets, head on car wrecks or plunges off cliffs....and the lead character walks away just fine every time, just like Braddock did in this one after taking enough hard head punches to kill a hundred men. All baloney, but kids unfortunately believe a lot of it and sometimes kill themselves acting it out.
This film was a human cartoon, no different than animated cartoons from Disney or Pixar.....with all of them having about the same believability, but it's the way Howard likes to see life through his films. The truth is, he never left Mayberry and Mayberry likes simple morality stories that end happily ever after, every single time.