Fighting in and out of the ring

Rating: 9/10 (26 February 2007)

Clint Eastwood is really making his mark as a director. In fact, I'd say that he's an even better director than he is (and was) an actor. He took a seemingly slow, passive, uneventful tale of a woman boxer and made it into something deeply moving and mesmerizing. I was easily wrapped into the main characters as they were intriguing and the actors did such a great job. There are rarely fairytale endings in real life, and the writers should be credited for being courageous enough to explore and present a dark ending. We were swept from the joyous emergence of a promising young female boxer who was beating every opponent, to her sudden and tragic fall into the fight of her life on her death bed and the battle with the decision of euthanasia. This movie was so excellent because it could have just as easily been poorly done. With the wrong actors, or wrong director, or wrong writers, this could have been a long sappy drawn out tragedy. I extend my compliments to a movie that made a person that dreads dramas and romance actually stay locked in.