A knockout - Trifecta acting; one of Eastwood's best ; Swank's best since winning Oscar

Rating: Null/10 (15 December 2004)

MILLION DOLLAR BABY (2004) **** Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman, Brian F. O' Byrne, Jay Baruchel, Mike Colter, Lucia Rijker, Margo Martindale, Bruce MacVittie, Ned Eisenberg.
(Dir: Eastwood) Trifecta acting; one of Eastwood's best ; Swank's best since winning Oscar Clint Eastwood continues his winning streak as film's crusty elder statesman in this absorbing character study about the boxing world with surprises bold and uncompromising  just like his lean, no-frills journeyman film-making trademark has always been.
Eastwood stars as Frankie Dunn, the grizzled, graying manager of a run-down gym that you could practically smell the blood, sweat and p*ss it has accumulated through the years of would-bes, wannabes and all-too familiar never-was pugilists who've darkened his establishment and worse, led him down the world-weary belief at one last attempt for a sure thing champion fighter title match.
Along comes feisty yet green boxer wannabe Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank, the picture of determination and laser-eyed for the prize moxie), a thirty-something waitress struggling to shake her 'white trash' sack of ashes for a chance at becoming a world-class fighter. Dunn shakes her off from the get go until he wanders in one night to visit his best friend and the gym's caretaker Eddie 'Scraps' Dupris (Freeman, the film's somber voiced narrator as well)  a former boxer whose only memory of glory days gone by is a milky blue glass eye  who instills the plucky young woman with a fortitude to focus on what she is all set to obtain. All she needs is the properly motivated manager and Dunn reluctantly at first accepts this first as a chore to be done with but when he seconds guess his rookie protégée he is given a hard-knocks lesson when he actually sees her raw talent in the ring which needs only his sure hand and in a twist of fate Frankie Dunn's legacy is wrapped up in one solid bout leading to a fighter with some serious unproven talent.
What follows are some wonderfully leisurely paced sequences (liberally sprinkled with humor) as Maggie is shown the ropes in what easily could've been a hackneyed notch to a long-in-the-tooth genre that seems to have been thawed out from Warner Bros.
Golden Age of tough talking' bout flicks of the Thirties and Forties, yet Eastwood eschews the cinematic lineage instead for a very impressive tale of three interlaced story lines and the flesh-and-bones/meat-and-potatoes characters of Frankie, Maggie and Scraps that feels entirely fresh as the viewer gladly goes along the seemingly predictable path line/montage of one unheralded success to the next until the out-of-nowhere left hook/uppercut combo in the film's final act that all I will say is a real tearjerker deftly handled with exceptional restraint by Eastwood and simply allows his family of players to play their cards as they are dealt with : realistically.
Swank continues to impress but you' ll never expect the tough, gritty and wonderful work she does here as the sad but not pathetic Maggie who only wants one thing and that is to be a success at her one talent  boxing. I dare say she is the most honest cinematic fighter since the original ROCKY ; that good.
Freeman is formidably damn good as always as the voice of experience and at times reason but he avoids the tragic path his character easily could've been depicted; instead his usual understated gravitas shines.
Paul Haggis' no-nonsense yet likable screenplay adaptation is based on boxing stories by F.X. Toole. What needs to be recognized is the theme of love throughout and how it can be achieved in the not-so-traditional paterfamilias/lover classifications but an amalgam of just that.
Eastwood resurrects his growling cadence from HEARTBREAK RIDGE but his Frankie Dunn is not a stock character  a loser looking for redemption  but a man who has seen his limits (echoing a quote from his Dirty Harry in THE ENFORCER  'A man's gotta know his limitations.') yet recognizes that his life does have meaning (even if it is in Gaelic, the one running joke of the film has Dunn reading it over and over and gives the final scene it's closure in his affected nickname for Maggie's fighting moniker from the ancient language).
One of the true genuine surprises of the year and arguably one of Eastwood's finest films ever. A knockout.