Wooden-nickle Baby

Rating: 4/10 (15 July 2005)

Far too many people praised this mediocrity of a movie. What wasn't derivative was offensive. Give it a miss!
The movie's made of two parts. The first is a totally predictable and unbelievable story of the meteoric rise from waitress to champion. It's a dull cliché-ridden story: the resistant master, the dark-skinned well-meaning sidekick, and then the non-stop ride to fame. In the second part, Eastwood chooses to lavish whatever psychological depth the movie has on the desire of the champ for death. Eastwood presents the decision to kill her as the noble and difficult thing to do one when in fact it was the easy way out.