The film is brutal and brutally honest in equal measure; a terrifically terrifying slice of hard edged drama featuring a number of talents quite arguably at their peak.

Rating: 8/10 (5 February 2011)

We begin with the titular Raging Bull gearing up before a contest, not one inside of ring but just prior to one of his stage duels in which he takes on the audience telling stories and anecdotes that pull in the crowds and the money. The man is Robert De Niro 's Jake La Motta; it's 1964, and after the brief practising of several lines to himself speaking of how he remembers every hit and every knock down and practically every detail of his in-ring boxing career, we dart back to 1941 to where it all began. With the benefit of hindsight, we're able to recall a number of other characters portrayed by De Niro in other Scorsese films in the form of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy, and the memorable monologues they brought about, before arriving at the conclusion this character we're observing here and now for the first time may very well be as disturbed as the other two in said examples. When La Motta speaks, there's a sense of specificity or intrinsics about the man's verbal confirmation of living his boxing life to the full, and the ability to take in the more minute details of what unravelled in the ring; Martin Scorsese's film eventually coming to resemble an inmost and often distressingly intrinsic study of this man's life from his young adult years to entering old age.
Scorsese doesn't doubt as to whether La Motta was a champion, without Scorsese's film one might champion him as a magnificent physical specimen and a champion athlete, but the manner as to which La Motta went about attaining this reputation, it seems and particularly at one point, sees him mercilessly hammer away at an opponent in a manner fuelled by hallucinations; scociopathic tendencies and mass hysteria that his wife, a long suffering Vickie (Moriarty) 'likes' the man he's fighting. But the film is as much a tale of the man outside of the ring as it is a tale of the man inside; how he came to be as aggressive and ruthlessly efficient as he was and how balancing that duality between an on-stage and off-stage persona through his aggression and anger became blurred and difficult to balance out. Raging Bull's immediate opening is a tranquil, beautiful almost, passage of slow motion as La Motta occupies the ring alone to some angelic music; that sense of it being of the picturesque sort and that La Motta truthfully belonged in the ring amidst everything else comes to feel prominent. In and around the scuzzy living of New York in whatever year, as the loitering with the sorts of people La Motta hangs with features more and more, the locale or space of the boxing ring comes to represent a very harmonious and very magnificent zone in which he totally finds his element and makes his name. It is a place of violence and often bloodshed, to La Motta through Scorsese's eyes, it was a small squared zone in which the lead was at one with himself.
The film covers his life and times, his friends and foes; his wife and her hardships as well as his brother in Joey (Pesci), a man whom appears to be the only one capable of talking any degree of sense into the lead but additionally someone who has his own problems with violence and misogyny. When Jake first sees his wife to be, she's lounging beside a pool on a warm day under the careful watch of some local organised criminals; the very same ones La Motta had previously had a problem with in a local gym and whom verbally illustrate how they dealt with another man whom himself tried to woo young Vickie. La Motta, being the man he is, steps in regardless and thus instigates a relationship through casual small-talk and sessions of mini-golf.
Vickie comes to represent the result of most of Jake's pent up rage, the immense paranoia twinned with gross levels of suspicion constantly threatening to destroy their coming together. At once, I criticised the film previously for not exploring their coming together enough and berated the lack of any substantial material believable enough to force them together. Viewing it again; it seems the film, in all its hostile ugliness, was always more concerned with how it was the lead tore their relationship apart what with his actions than it was ever interested in the stuff that borough them both harmoniously together. It is, however, the two brothers that the film produces some of the more magnificent moments of dialogue and exchange, a telling moment about where Scorsese's chief interests lie in the tale of Jake outside of the ring occurs during an instance in which he kisses his future wife on a date before moving off screen to further embrace. But the camera does not follow as one might expect, instead lingering on the mantle-piece that they were stood in-front of which now occupies the foreground upon which a photo of Joey and Jake together stands. The film here infers that the bond between the two brothers is the strongest of the film, if there is a stone-wall relationship between two people in the film, it is that of Jake and his brother; the reminding it is they whom argue and bicker and squabble like the couple they are.
Raging Bull plays, for mostly all of its runtime, a lot like his 1973 film Mean Streets; the core change pushing it off down a very different framework that there happens to be a prize fighting boxer in and amongst the low-lives of which the film centralises on. The film is both peppered and undercut with a really uneasy sense of both hostility and hatred; Scorsese embedding the piece with a seething anger which you feel might just boil over and explode and any moment whereas the result is something highly substantial in a number of fields and most certainly worthy of seeking out.