I liked it.

Rating: Null/10 (5 February 2005)

The first part of the movie seems like a corny rehash of cliché stuff about boxing. The Clint Eastwood character is a burned-out relic of a manager, and the Hilary Swank character is a 31-year-old boxing buff who has one last chance to make it. So she wins him over blah blah blah.
If that were all there was to the movie, it would be a small-screen time-waster, and you had to wonder what all the buzz was about -- there _is_ buzz, Academy Awards for lots of categories -- because it was basically Eastwood being dark and contained and Swank being goshwow and bubbly. But then over it all was Morgan Freeman, as a Watson-type viewpoint character, doing a voice-over with that incredible rasping voice. He can say more with a moment of silence than some actors can do with a page of Shakespeare.
There's also (to me) the cognitive dissonance of watching pretty girls beat the crap out of eat other for money. I didn't even know women did prize-fighting.
I don't want to reveal the movie's "surprise" ending, though it's not so much a surprise as a paradigm shift. A fair comparison would be last year's _Seabiscuit_: a sports movie that seems to follow the classic mold, and then turns modern-to-postmodern on you. I found it pretty satisfying, and through the movie's final twists and turns, you feel the tight control Eastwood had, as director-producer and extremely restrained actor. (He also wrote the score, which is good.)
Maybe it's not a feel-good movie. Maybe it depends on what makes you feel good.