Ticks all the right boxes and marks Rourke's comeback as a whole

Rating: 10/10 (22 November 2009)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
Randy 'The Ram' Robinson (Mickey Rourke) was a 1980s wrestling phenomenon, but years later he's a washed up has been who does the odd bit of wrestling here and there to a select crowd only. Estranged from Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood) the daughter he was never there for, a sudden heart problem causes him to reassess his life and get back in touch with her, as well as try and get a relationship going with similarly past her prime stripper Cassidy (Marisa Tomei.) But when the opportunity for a major comeback match beckons, he's torn between the only thing he's ever been any good at and the personal life he's made such a mess of.
Everyone over the age of eleven knows wrestling is staged and fake. Beefed up muscle men inflicting cartoonishly painful attacks and seeming torture on each other, as well as a lack of any genuinely competitive element or rules you can't break. Nevertheless, it has a world wide network of die-hard fans that annually pack out arenas and stadiums, making it a global enterprise in itself, so it's detractors have a large slice of humble pie to chew on. But, like many other 'sports', there is a definite chew them up and spit them out mentality to it, with stories of steroid abuse, backstage corruption and former champions going off the rails when they become past their prime. And in an almost semi autobiographical way, Mickey Rourke here perfectly brings to life a grizzled has been, whose isolated, pathetic existence is quite at odds with the high life he must have once enjoyed. You get the real feel of what it must feel like to have climbed so high and fallen so hard. Still, Randy's a fu*k up with a heart of gold you just can't help but love, a hard bitten, wise cracking tough guy whose spirit never manages to truly dampen in spite of relations in his personal life crashing down around him like Rome. The lack of a woman in his life is something he tries to resolve by starting to get something going with Cassidy (Tomei.) Although she's reluctant because dating a customer is a line she doesn't want to cross, she's in denial to the obvious attraction to Randy, in the sense they're both ageing has beens who can't cope with life without an audience, the one thing they both make a better job of than what's going on around them.
'Acclaimed' director Darren Aronofsky has taken an unlikely subject matter and turned it into one of the most surprising and sensitive offerings of recent times. There's not much I can say that others already have, but this deservedly put Rourke back in the spotlight and wrongly failed to win any awards. *****