boring boxing melodrama

Rating: 6/10 (15 July 2005)

What happened to the critics, what happened to all the fans of this film? What did you guys find interesting in this boring production? How could this film fill in shelves with Oscar prizes - I believe that this says more about the poor state of the film art in US than everything else.
It's a rather simple story - Swank is a destiny-hit young woman, working as a waitress and gathering every penny to become a boxing girl. Why - probably just for the seek of the script, we are never told why does she not invest her money in going to college, for example. Clintwood and Freeman are box trainers, quite failed ones, with a common past, and a broken family (Eastwood) finding in Swank's character kind of a surrogate daughter.
The first 40 minutes of the film are spent with Swank convincing the two to accept her as a trainee. Then, a few fights, and it's the best part of the film. The last 40 minutes are spent in pure melodrama, and I would say no more, as people will still go and maybe enjoy it - I did not.
Acting is reasonable, especially Eastwod and Freeman. Swank is average, her work is far still from Oscar level. The director Eastwood never convinced me, and he is not doing it in this film either. There are good box movies, I remember Zefirelli's 'The Chanp' with Jon Voight - that one was a melodrama too, but here, 25 years later Eastwood has nothing new to say. It just does not ring me any bell, I was simply disappointed by this film.