One Word Movie

Million Dollar Baby

I was well up for watching this film, I thought it sounded interesting. There's not much that can be done with a boxing movie, normally it all boils down to whether they win the big fight at the end of the film. Movies about women boxers aren't a novelty either, there was that Girlfight film (good) that came out a while ago, but that was nothing much more than a competent rehearsing of the same old lines.

Million Dollar Baby promised something else, it promised a twist. Well, the twist is, is that it turns into a shit TV-movie half-way through. And Morgan Freeman is cast purely so he can provide a voice-over, a device which becomes downright bizarre at the end.

The boxing scenes were like you would expect, i.e. they look like boxing to someone who knows nothing about boxing. What was more peculiar is that the drama scenes also seem to have been written by someone who knows nothing about humans.

The story is taken from a collection of stories (Rope Burns) by a man who luxuriates in the name of F X Toole. Toole does a good job with the short story format because he writes about boxing well, and he's got a good turn of phrase with the third-person narration. Neither of these strengths translate to the cinema at all, but his weaknesses in structure and characterisation do. For instance, the last line of the story 'Million $$$ Baby' in Rope Burns is this: "With his shoes in his hand but without his soul, he moved silently down the rear stairs and was gone, his eyes as dry as a burning leaf". And at the end of the film, Morgan Freeman suggests that the cure for all a man's problems is a slice of home-made lemon pie. Yes. Really. That's really what it says. This film is shit and how anyone could mistake it for something good is beyond me.

posted by Chairman Peyote @ 4:33 AM