Return To Sender

Rating: 5/10 (3 November 2013)

What a dull disappointment. Clint chose to make a movie about boxing and all the mawkish 'rising underdog'/too old to succeed-meets cranky mentor with a heart of gold clichés.
The idea seems to be, take the best parts of "Fat City", "Rocky", "Shawshank Redemption", etc., stick them in a saucepan and boil them down to this, and it's guaranteed to be tasty.
Do we need to hear Freeman as the god/narrator again? Really? But Clint figured the movie couldn't function without him, as he seems to think the audience needs to explicitly hear him receive forgiveness from the deity.
The genre has been done to death, so if one is going to make a boxing movie, the movie needs to be about something other than boxing: "Raging Bull" was really about sado-masochism; "Diggstown" was really about con artistry; "Fat City" was really about the agriculture worker underclass.
And one area that Clint always gets right is his depiction of the blue-collar world and his effective promotion of young, unknown actors up the ranks. He would get this right in the superior "Gran Torino". There, he takes chances and succeeds; here, he takes absolutely no chances at all. It is contrived, and radiates this fact in an offensive way. No thanks.