Lost In the dust

Rating: Null/10 (31 December 2004)

I am truly on the fringe in even posting my reaction to this film since my reaction, enjoyment and assessment is in the one percent. I have read every review after my viewing and they all say the same words, as if they all got a handout before a screening and were nudged closer to the grander thoughts of Eastwood.
Yes, I missed something in this minimalist script with minimalist direction with minimalist emotions in a minimalist development.
I guess it was simply not my movie. We all have those experiences, I assume.
The most distracting character was Danger Barch  that clown that other training boxers would want to kill and take out. Danger's presence not make sense either on the front side of the story or his later resurrection with some sort of immaculate redemption in having seen God and awarded a new nose without scars in the surrounding facial tissue. No emotion in my viewing.
Morgan Freeman was simply Morgan Freeman. That is what he is good with and comfortable. No emotion in my viewing.
Maggie Fitzgerald came on with a strong Texan drawl or whatever that did not fit the character and which soon disappeared. And we never know the comfort she gets from Southern boxing and taking out other females on the canvas. Did she hit a guy first and got her rocks off? Or was it a female that she jabbed and got a jolt of estrogen? Did she pounce on her mother? No clue. I was clueless once again.
What did I miss? There are two parts what were good: (1) the fighting mano a mano (okay, I admit that I do no know the female equivalent in that male expression) with the ladies. (2) the moment upon delivering a house to the mother and family. At that moment, we know something about the family but not Maggie since there was conflict undisclosed. Two strong points in the movie. Later encounters with the family at the hospital were just stupid and predictable with poor acting messing it all up.
What did I miss? Okay, now Maggie is in the hospital with some sort of spinal injury that requires assisted respiratory breathing tubes. Air is forced in the lungs and air is drawn out of the lungs where her normal breathing and speaking were bypassed. The machine pumped air in and the machine pulled air out.
At no time during the visit of Frankie Dunn was Maggie's breath in talking disrupted between the mechanical uptake and outlet of air. She spoke perfect tomes to Frankie. Hey, just try talking while inhaling and exhaling --- you can to it!!! And your voice changes!!! Okay.
How was Frankie Dunn able to get into a hospital late at night from an outside, unlocked door that leads directly to an Intensive Care unit??? We are now at the end of the film and at the Intensive or Critical Care unit. An attendant at the end of the hallway is going on a coffee break and all we see he her announcing here intent at a typical hospital counter in a small view setting.
The attendant leaves and that is when Frankie pulls the plug on a Critical Care patient. We see the monitors slowly beeping into existence as we assume the same for Maggie. Blank. The patient-side monitors are dead as is Maggie.
Now one must wonder at this point: is patient monitoring in Critical Care for the benefit of the patient to listen to the bleeps and blips of sounds? Or are those signals sent to a Critical Care central point where the coffee going nurse turned over monitoring responsibility to the unknown skilled care nurse beyond our view? Frankie walks down that long, dark hallway and exits a door that is open 7-24 at this hospital that holds about 20 other patients. Anybody can walk in that door and the hospital staff does not care.
If Hilary Swank died that night in an unattended manner, what happened to those other 20 patients in need of care? Hmmmmvery stupid stuff.
Or, perhaps this film was mapping at a local hospital in Los Angeles that is controversial at this moment. It is the King/Drew hospital in which the Los Angeles Times newspaper a few weeks ago exposed a setting that perhaps was presaged by Clint Eastwood hospital health care incompetence.
But I doubt that his film was about King/Drew. Yet that is my closest interpretation of being lost in the dust.