Against the Ropes Review
by Harvey S. Karten (harveycritic AT cs DOT com)February 19th, 2004
AGAINST THE ROPES
Reviewed by: Harvey S. Karten
Grade: C
Paramount Pictures
Directed by: Charles Dutton
Written by: Cheryl Edwards, inspired by the life of Jackie Kallen Cast: Meg Ryan, Omar Epps, Tony Shalhoub, Timothy Daly, Charles Dutton, Joseph Cortese, Kerry Washington
Screened at: Loews Lincoln Sq., NYC, 2/17/04
What's a nice, Jewish, suburban girl to do if she has no husband and no kids? Sports, of course, especially if she has ambitions to become the star of a movie about her professional life. Ice hockey is taken up, so no miracle can be found in that area. Football, soccer, basketball, baseball, track, even swimming all the way to Cambodia all old hat. Though Sly Stallone took boxing to new peaks, there's quite a bit of room for originality in movie takes. How about a woman manager in what's not only a man's sport but a most violent one, featuring guys who are so needy that they're willing to get subject themselves to a decade or so of pummeling? Just so, especially since boxing history has pages reserved for Jackie Kallen, the aforementioned nice, Jewish, suburban
femme played, of course, by Meg Ryan wearing outfits so tight that make one wonder whether Jackie got out of the back rooms intant.
Charles Dutton, who both directed and performed as a trainer, takes Cheryl Edwards' script, milking it for all its cliches and then some. Trite dialogue combines with Michael Kamen's banal, generic music to yield a pic that does indeed touch the emotions but lacks the kind of punch that would survive in the mind of any fan without short-term memory loss. Credit the crew, especially Jack Green's photography and Eric L. Beason's slick editing for their ability to manipulate us into getting lumps in our throats at the final bell even though we knew how things would end up even before Round One.
The fictional tale inspired by Ms. Kallen introduces us to Jackie (Meg Ryan), a woman who grew up in the boxing world ever since she skipped rope at a Detroit gym regularly, a guest of her uncle, starting about the age of eight. Jackie is now working as executive assistant (coffee!) to Irving Abel (Joe Cortese), who is director of the Cleveland Coliseum, spending her spare time hanging out with the hairy-chested men at a masculine club. Thinking that she knows boxing as well as any guy, she manipulates the Midwest's principal manager of fighters, LaRocca (Tony Shalhoub), into giving her the contract on one particular pugilist whom she visits only to watch him get knocked about his room by drug enforcer Luther Shaw (Omar Epps). While Shaw has no experience in the ring, Jackie convinces him to take his chances with her as manager. They pick up retired trainer Felix Reynolds (Charles S. Dutton), at which time the audience can spot the entire trajectory: ghetto loser transformed. Jackie is no saint: She becomes in her way as arrogant as her former boss, Abel, and boxing kingpin LaRocca. On the way up, she takes every opportunity to be photographed, interviewed on TV, even answering questions directed by journalists to her fighter.
Two flawed characters strut their stuff amid a background of characters who are either all bad or all good; the former including an intrusive HBO broadcaster, who gets her to agree to dump her scheduled interview with a local Cleveland guy (he's good). Her former partner in Abel's office, Renee (Kerry Washington), who hooks up with Luther, is good while the guy whom Luther fights for the world middleweight champion, Pedro Hernandez (Juan Hernandez) is bad: we know that because he hits Luther below the belt and disses him just before the start of Round 1.
Yes...the movie should please those feminists who insist that they can do everything as well as men, and liberals who'd applaud the easy mingling of whites and blacks--whose antipathies arise out of conflicts other than racial ones. As "One Man's Opinion" writer Frank Swietek says in his review, you'd do better to check out "girlfight," which transcends the usual generic dialogue common to sports pictures, featuring an alienated Latina teen (Michelle Rodriguez) who believably takes out her anger in the ring.
Rated PG-13. 111 minutes.(c) 2004 by Harvey Karten at
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