After the tremendous success of Gladiator, Russell Crowe thought it would be time to step in the arena and play a fighter once again. This time a modern gladiator with boxing gloves instead of a sword and a boxing ring for a Roman arena. Crowe portrays the true story of James J. Braddock: a boxer from the 1930s who after a promising career hit rock bottom due to injury and the Great Depression. It’s a typical “rags to riches” story and the fact that it is based on a true story, does take nothing away from the fact that we have seen this story before (and better?) in Stallone’s Rocky. And as boxing movies usually turn out to be disappointing on the action level (it just doesn’t seem to work on the big screen) you’d expect the real fireworks to come from the drama and acting. But it doesn’t. And to make things worse: it features Renée Zellweger as Crowe’s wife…

It all started off wrong with this ridiculous title: Cinderella Man. It doesn’t sound really masculine and heroic. More like some pansy with a couple of nasty siblings and a lucky punch or perhaps a pumpkin-headed boxer with a tiny glass jaw? There could’ve been a hundred names more fitting, but they had to come up with the worst. Russell Crowe will now have to spend the rest of his life nicknamed “Cinderfella” by me.

I can imagine Americans loving this movie (and the IMDb-rating seems to back that thought up): it’s the classic American dream. A guy picked down to the ground, forced to see his family suffer, his dignity taken away but yet he maintains his pride and honour and rises as a phoenix from its ashes (there’s Cinderella again). American people just love this stuff and so they gobbled it all up. Moreover since it was prepared by specialised gobble chef, Ron Howard, who now seems to have made a career out of portraying historic American heroism. Personally, it makes me want to heave. I could dig Apollo 13 and Backdraft, because they had cool subjects, but the historic settings of Far and Away or The Alamo are just wasted on me. And I also could not stand A Beautiful Mind, where “Little Opie” had Crowe play a twitch-ridden genius. Only this time he opportunistically veered off the factual course and turned the real-life misanthropic mathematician in some loveable Rain Man. If you’re doing a biography, stick to the facts, man! Have some sack.

My big, overall beef with this movie was the gratuitousness of it. It is all so clean-cut, black&white in its portrayal of the different situations: when everything is going well, it’s all going more than swell, but when it’s going bad it all goes Shakespearianly bad. To give an example of the latter: in almost one fell swoop we see a note of the milkman spelling “due paid” between empty bottles and then the power company guy who comes to shut down their power in the middle of friggin’ winter. I mean: come on! Why not have a sandwich-man walk through the frame with a sign that says: “Dire Times are Here Again” while tap-dancing to it?! It insults my intelligence and this childish imagery is hugely patronising. Same goes for the begging scene: it’s just all too thickly set and as a consequence it does not touch you as it was intended to. To sum it all up: Howard is – again – dealing in cheap sentiment and tries to go directly for the jugular. He’s the discount drama pimp.

And what about the acting, you’d ask? Well, apart from a solid performance from Paul Giamatti, it’s generally bland. Crowe is not convincing enough and I don’t see the fighting spirit a boxer like him should have. And Zellweger… (sigh) Aside from the fact that I cannot stand the woman, her performance seems unnecessarily stretched. Her role as Crowe’s conscious seems superfluous as, eventually, he does exactly what he wants to do. They should have stuck to the relationship between Giamatti and Crowe and put some true drama in that. That is a thing that does work in boxing movies, like Rocky with Mickey and Eastwood with Swank. James Braddock’s family is used as a mere symbol for his motivation, but we see little of his own inner spirit; his drive that made him this terrific fighter.

All missed opportunities to make a gripping drama of a story that had some potential.

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