Flawed and therefore overrated

Rating: Null/10 (11 February 2005)

Eastwood's film about a veteran boxing trainer who reluctantly takes on a female fighter starts slowly, builds in excitement, then abruptly runs out of ideas. I won't give away the ending (I've heard that if you do Eastwood comes round and personally beats the crap out of you), but I will say I found it clumsy, contrived and (worst crime) far too drawn out.
The film works fine in the claustrophobic atmosphere of Eastwood's gym, but when Eastwood and Swank move out into the wider world it gets lost. Eastwood is preparing Swank for a world title fight, but where are the promoters, the agents, the TV crews(the fights appear to televise themselves, the lawyers, for goodness sake? Why doesn't anyone offer Swank sponsorship (for example Everlast, who get their logo into every other frame in this movie)? There's a bit where Swank mentions "magazine articles" but we never even see her talking to a fan, let alone a journalist. Her entire career seems to take place in a vacuum, when common sense tells you anyone who looked and performed like her would be an instant media sensation.
The problem seems to be lie with the time-frame of the film. It's nominally set in the near-present (Eastwood waves a VHS cassette at one point) but its heart is in the '40s or '50s, or rather a sort of non-specific past mythical past you get in "The Shawshank Redemption".
There's much to enjoy here in the way of dialogue and cinematography, balanced by some major longeurs and lapses of taste (such as going totally OTT in its determination to stick it to welfare claimants). It's not so very bad, but I can't see where the Oscar nominations are coming from.