Maggie is touching but movie is flawed and cliché

Rating: 3/10 (6 November 2005)

With the exception of Hillary Swank's, the characters were 1 dimensional or stolen out of previous movies. I like that Morgan Freeman role; I really do. Perhaps no one plays the quiet, down on his luck, sensitive but tough narrator like Morgan Freeman does. Of course, he should be good at it since years before he played a nearly identical character in Shawshank Redemption. I guess I just didn't want to see Red again with only his name changed. I can't be so generous with Clint. If you put him up for best actor this time then you have to put him up for all the other times he played a good man of few words. Can you really say this was an original character for him? It was Maggie's family, however, that bothered me most. They weren't bad, they were 1 dimensional evil. There was nothing misunderstood or complex about them; they were just plain rotten. And the mother tells Maggie she lost the fight. Am I supposed to be stupid? ESPN broadcasts a title fight in which a boxer does a cheap shot for the ages and we're supposed to believe that never mind jail, she was actually given the win? One long time boxing analyst has commented that he has never seen or heard of an event like that in all his years of following the sport. You can put an extraordinary cheap shot in the movie but don't ask me to believe that girl wasn't at least disqualified. That's just absurd. These pieces aside, the movie splits into 2 sections. The first part is a typical overcome adversity sports movie that was pretty good within that highly populated niche. It could have just ended there but instead it used the absurd cheap shot to transform into an outright depressing story. Here the movie benefited from how likable Swank's character was, but was hurt by the introduction of her unbelievably horrible family. I could only come to the conclusion that Clint was willing to use any tactic to make it more upsetting. When you step back and look at the film, it wasn't telling us much about real life unless Clint's view of the world is that there's no point digging yourself out of a hole because no matter what you do some ridiculous cheap shot will knock you back in. Maggie didn't fail on her own. She did absolutely everything right and just took some freak accident that has no real world place in the activity she was involved with. If that wasn't bad enough, she was stuck with a family so 1-dimensionally nasty as to lack credibility. What's the point? What did I learn from that? If you want to be depressed in a legit way that actually teaches us about the world we live in, watch Terms of Endearment or Ordinary People. Those movies are about the real world and what people have to overcome. They don't have mothers yelling at their daughters for buying them houses. And they don't focus on the non existent problem in this world of too many people somehow breaking their spine by getting hit in the back of the head while walking back to their boxing corner.