Excellent! Yet not as good as Cinderella Man

Rating: 10/10 (2 April 2006)

Million Dollar Baby/2004/
Main Stars: Clint Eastwood Hilary Swank Morgan Freeman
One of the best films of the year besides "The Aviator" and "Batman Begins!" It definitely makes sense to give this movie four Academy Awards! Now, a lot of you people probably think that this movie is all about boxing; well it ain't! You see this movie has a lot to do with relationship between a young woman named Margaret "Maggie" Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank) and an older man named Franklin "Frankie" Dunn (Clint Eastwood). At the very beginning of the movie (believe it or not) there's a boxing match taking place and you see Frankie standing near his boxer's corner and the boxer just happens to be a guy. About a day later he sees a young woman (Maggie is who he sees) punching a punching bag and Frankie is known to be an old grouch. So, he walks down to see her and growls, "I don't train girls!" after she repeatedly asked him to be her trainer for boxing. About a day or two later he finally said, "Okay." As everyone should know, Morgan Freeman was in this movie playing a former boxer named Scrap, now the caretaker of the gym where people practice punching punching bags and boxing. He wasn't a trainer but he knew a lot about boxing just like Frankie. He also helped Maggie when she needed help. After much training and many fights Maggie had saved enough money to buy her "trailer trash" family a new house. The thing is instead of thanking her, the family was mad because the mom didn't think she would receive her welfare payments if they were going to live in this new house. So Maggie gave up on her family and continued to box and got better and better until the World Title fight, when a very unfortunate thing happened (I won't tell you). You and you only will find out the ending to this remarkable, extremely well acted, and fantastic movie. Movie directed by Clint Eastwood.