Excellent right up to the end

Rating: 9/10 (9 September 2003)

Raging Bull was the first of the Scorsese/De Niro partnership that I watched and it was well worth my time. A powerful, emotional, beautifully crafted biographical tale of a boxer with an overly-aggressive temperament and an anger management problem, it took me to a high cliff peak and essentially just dropped me by the end.
Up to the two hour mark and Jake La Motta's final fight, this film is one of the greatest and most powerful I've ever seen, but for me the ending didn't quite stick because it came as quite an anticlimax to what was basically such a climactic story. The character of Jake La Motta is artfully constructed and De Niro's performance defies definition and yet the film as a whole left me feeling unfulfilled because the emotion that was so paramount up to that point became quite slow and stagnant; as a biography it works well, but not brilliantly.
That's not to detract anything at all from this exceptional classic, that was merely how I felt after watching the film. Scorsese really shows his true class and quality in this film, he is such a master craftsman and manages to extract one of the most memorable anti-hero performances of all time from De Niro while Joe Pesci also does a fine job as Joey.
I really wanted to enjoy this film and I really wanted it to be better but the way I see it, it could either have been made longer to extract all of the story from the final half hour, or have cut out the last half hour altogether because overall, it just seemed almost completely irrelevant in the way it was made. ****1/2 / *****