BEFORE: I feel pretty confident in my boxing chain, even though I can no longer call it "Boxing's Final Round", as I wanted to. Thanks a lot, "Southpaw". And in just over a week, I'm going to break for some documentary action. That might be a good time for me to review the films left on the list, to make sure I've got the best possible links set up, a chain that will incorporate the most films with the least number of breaks, both in 2015 and in 2016. Up until now, most of my linking work has been done with cast lists written on pen and paper, but I finally came up with a way to use the IMDB web-site to assist me with my linking. SO, maybe it is time to tear apart the remainder of the list and put it back together again. Or if all of 2016's films form a chain, maybe I can leave the rest of 2015 alone. But I'll never know I've got it right until I check it all out.
Ring announcer Michael Buffer carries over from "Ready to Rumble", as I said he would, so let's, well, you know...
THE PLOT: A fictional story inspired by North America's most famous female boxing promoter, Jackie Kallen - her struggle to survive and succeed in a male-dominated sport.
AFTER: I really didn't mind this film at all - it wasn't flat-out great, just right down the middle. Maybe watching "The Great White Hype" and "Ready to Rumble" made it seem better by comparison, I'm not sure. But it's a perfectly fine boxing film, it's got the standard training montage, it's got the improbable title shot with the unrefined challenger against the cocky champion, it's got just enough information about technique to make you think it's teaching you something about boxing, when it probably isn't.
What makes it difference is the focus on the boxer's female manager, and since this is based on a true story (Jackie Kallen started managing in 1988, although the time period isn't that important - there are so few references to news events or tech things that this could be set in just about any decade) it becomes not just a story about sports, it becomes a story about equal rights. There's that delicate balance that took place in the 1980's and 1990's where a woman could technically do anything she wanted, only for certain jobs, there just weren't any women who were interested. Even today, we COULD have a woman coaching a major league baseball or football team, but why don't we? Is it still a men's club that's tough to break into, or are women just not interested in holding those positions?
Sports movies are funny, too, in that the most popular ones are still all about men (not counting documentaries, of course, I recently watched part of one about Billie Jean King that I found quite fascinating...) and the focus varies wildly from sport to sport, I've found. Boxing films, of course, tend to be about particular boxers ("Ali", "The Hurricane"), and so do films about golf or track ("The Legend of Bagger Vance", "Without Limits"). When you get into team sports like hockey or football, you get films like "The Mighty Ducks" or "Any Given Sunday", with lots of characters. Baseball sort of goes both ways, with some films about individual players ("Babe", "Cobb", "42") and some about teams ("Major League").
And then there are the films that concentrate on the coaches, for team sports like basketball ("Hoosiers", "Blue Chips") and football ("Friday Night Lights", "We Are Marshall"). The coach is kind of like a member of the team, right? Boxing touches on this a little, in films like "Rocky" and "Million Dollar Baby". But there aren't many films about sports managers - the only other one I can think of is "Moneyball". So it's really strange that for three films in a row, boxing and wrestling managers and promoters have been quite prominent. Hey, maybe that's just good planning on my part.
But whether you find Jackie Kallen's story interesting probably depends on how much of it you're willing to believe (right, because every drug-dealing thug has the heart of a boxing champion...) or perhaps on how you feel about women working in a very male-dominated sport. (I realize now that we do have female coaches, but they're still relegated to coaching women's teams, so clearly there's still a long way to go...) There is tension between the fictional Kallen and her boxer protegé, but it's debatable how much of that comes from the man/woman dynamic and how much of it comes from one or the other just trying to one-up each other.
The life lessons here include the familiar "Be nice to people on the way up, because you're going to be seeing them again on the way down", or perhaps it's "Treat people the way you want to be treated", or some variation of "Honesty is the best policy". Jackie keeps telling herself that any publicity she gets for herself is also good publicity for her boxer, but then at some point has to question whether that's really the case.
Also starring Meg Ryan (last seen in "In the Cut"), Omar Epps (last seen in "Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood"), Charles S. Dutton (last seen in "Random Hearts"), Tony Shalhoub (last seen in "A Life Less Ordinary"), Tim Daly, Kerry Washington (last seen in "The Last King of Scotland"), Holt McCallany (last seen in "The Peacemaker"), Juan Carlos Hernandez, with cameos from Dean McDermott, Jason Jones (last seen in "Pitch Perfect"), Sean Bell.
RATING: 5 out of 10 sparring partners
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