One Cliché After Another

Rating: Null/10 (12 January 2014)

Grudge Match (2013)
** (out of 4)
Disappointing teaming of Robert DeNiro and Sylvester Stallone has them playing aging boxers who never got to have their third bout to see which one was the better fighter. The two agree to the third battle but soon all sorts of personal drama makes them question their motives. GRUDGE MATCH is an incredibly disappointing film but hey, you gotta think that teaming ROCKY and RAGING BULL would have been a good idea. Well, it would have been a good idea perhaps twenty-years ago but it's just a tad bit hard to swallow no matter how hard they try to push it on you. Perhaps it's just me but I just can't see DeNiro being able to stay in the ring with Stallone. With that said, there are so many problems here that keeps this from being more entertaining and especially the sloppy screenplay that throws one cliché after another at you. Of course there's going to be a woman (Kim Basinger) in the middle. There's going to be a son coming out of nowhere. There's going to be health issues. Money issues. Then there are the various boxing clichés that come up throughout the film. I think both DeNiro and Stallone offer good performances but the screenplay just gives both of them so few chances to actually try and do something. The film is either trying to be too sweet or too funny with bad jokes. Alan Arkin plays a character better suited in GRUMPY OLD MEN. Kevin Hart, wow, this guy just wasn't funny here. The jokes are usually aimed at the old but they're just not very original. It really does seem as if someone thought it was a great idea to have ROCKY fight RAGING BULL but after getting the actors to agree to it they just got lazy and did nothing else story wise. There are so many things that could have been handled better and director Peter Segal deserves a lot of the blame. Even the final boxing match contains very little to no excitement. GRUDGE MATCH would have been a miracle to pull off and sadly they didn't do it.