Vastly overrated celebration of dysfunction and despair

Rating: 1/10 (24 September 2005)

I just saw this movie and am utterly flabbergasted at the number and intensity of positive reviews for this nihilistic garbage. From a technical standpoint, the movie is rarely better than mediocre. Yes, Hilary Swank's acting is fine as far as it goes, but very little is demanded of the role. Her character is basically a cliché. Clint Eastwood is, as usual, Clint Eastwood (imagine a geriatric sad-sack version of Dirty Harry or nearly any other Eastwood character, and there you have him in this film), and Morgan Freeman adds little other than an unnecessary voice-over. The first act is both unrelentingly dull and unimaginative. It strives to come off as some sort of gritty, realistic slice of life, but with nothing but stock characters and dialog, it is doomed from the start. Underlying the film from virtually the first frame is a pervasive mood of despair, emphasizing Clint's estrangement from his daughter and concomitant pangs of guilt, as well as his repeated missed opportunities at making it big.
The second act, where Swank's character rises in the ranks as a boxer, is mostly entertaining, but is marred by the introduction to the audience of her family -- the most cartoonish gaggle of white trash put to celluloid in recent memory. Mind you, stereotypes don't necessarily offend me because they are unfair, but because they show absolutely zero imagination. And when their sole purpose is, as here, to manipulate, I resent the filmmakers' assumption that the audience is too stupid to get their point without being smacked over the head with such a blunt dramatic instrument.
The third act is a ramping-up of, and a capitulation to, the despair that already underlay the film from the first. In case you haven't seen it or heard about it, I won't give away the details (although I don't know why I shouldn't, since I don't recommend the movie anyway), but it is an incredible downer. The film first teases the audience that there may be some redemption in the offing: Clint basically finds a new daughter in Hilary to replace the real daughter he has irretrievably lost, and Hilary finds a new father in Clint to replace her deceased father -- the only member of her family who was worth a da*n, apparently. But the hint of a happy ending to come is just another manipulation, and comes off like Lucy pulling a football away from Charlie Brown -- a cheap trick. I have no problem with a tragic story as such, but there should be either some element of heroism or a moral lesson to wash it down. This has neither. All it offers is a surrender to helplessness and a descent into wretchedness. To the extent that the filmmakers were aiming at bittersweet, all they hit was the bitter. They might want to take a gander at the immeasurably superior Finding Neverland to see how to do it right.