Million Dollar Baby Review

by Jon Popick (jpopick AT sick-boy DOT com)
December 20th, 2004
PLANET SICK-BOY: http://www.sick-boy.com "We Put the SIN in Cinema"

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Not to be confused with the Ronald Reagan film from the '40s, Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby might be the best boxing movie since Scorsese's Raging Bull. At one point, while thoroughly engrossed in Baby's story, I said to myself, "There hasn't been one artful, slow-motion shot inside the ring." Then, Eastwood made with the film's sole slo-mo shot, and boy, it's a doozy.
Baby, adapted by too-often-neglected television writer/producer Paul Haggis (EZ Streets, Michael Hayes) from a story by former "cut man" F.X. Toole, is about a grizzled trainer named Frankie Dunn (Eastwood, Blood Work) who reluctantly takes on a 31-year-old female boxer (Hilary Swank, The Core) with no formal schooling in the art of the ring. Their relationship, as well as the trajectory of her career, doesn't exactly break any ground, but under Eastwood's tutelage, the familiar story blossoms in ways you won't quite expect (and, thankfully, I don't mean a May-December romance).

I had minor issues with Baby's surprising third act, but the first two more than make up for it. Swank, cut like she's Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, logs in what is easily her best performance since taping her boobs down in Boys Don't Cry (admittedly, that's not much of a statement) Eastwood has been walking through films since 1992's Unforgiven, but is very effective here, as is Morgan Freeman, Baby's Shawshank-ish narrator, who finally shows a bit of range. Baby is, in a year of fairly disappointing year-end pictures, the pick of the litter.

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