Million Dollar Baby movie review, Clint Eastwood, Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman, Anthony Mackie, Jay Baruchel, Christina Cox. Review by Rob Blackwelder ©SPLICEDwire
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THE GIRL PACKS A PUNCH
A scene from 'Million Dollar Baby'
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"MILLION DOLLAR BABY"
3.5stars
137 minutes | Rated: R
LIMITED: Friday, December 17, 2004
WIDE: Friday, January 21, 2005
Directed by Clint Eastwood

Starring Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman, Anthony Mackie, Jay Baruchel



This film is on the Best of 2004 list.


 ARCHIVE INTERVIEWS
Read our interview with Hilary Swank Hilary Swank (2001)


 COUCH CRITIQUE
   SMALL SCREEN SHRINKAGE: 20%
   WIDESCREEN: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

This is a very atmospheric film that deserves the most theater-like environment you can muster.



 OTHER REVIEWS/COMING SOON
  Brilliant woman-boxer movies:
('00) "Girlfight"
  • Boxing
  • Clint Eastwood
  • Hilary Swank
  • Morgan Freeman
  • Anthony Mackie


  •  LINKS for this film
    Official site
    at movies.yahoo.com
    at Rotten Tomatoes
    at Internet Movie Database
    Powerful performances, Eastwood's trademark emotional gravitas place 'Baby' among the all-time great boxing pictures

    By Rob Blackwelder

    Director Clint Eastwood pulls no punches in "Million Dollar Baby," a devastating, gritty film-noir boxing drama that gets at the callused heart of the sport while also spiraling into an emotional tour de force.

    Narrated with gravelly gravitas by Morgan Freeman, playing a washed-up fighter now mopping floors at a washed-out gym, the film stars Eastwood as a fatigued former cut man who reluctantly agrees to coach a novice woman boxer (Hilary Swank) running as hard and fast as she can from a white-trash upbringing that's still tethered to her with a psychological bungee cord -- the more she pulls away, the harder her past snaps back and hits her from behind.

    Blessed with fearless, evocative performances, each with thick layers of leather-hide humanity, this near-masterpiece has a sweaty noir eloquence in its look (hard shadows fall across every corner of Eastwood's gym), in its dialogue (courtesy of screenwriter Paul Haggis, adapting two short stories from F.X. Toole's "Rope Burns" collection) and in its nothing-ever-comes-easy plot.

    After a steep learning curve of weeks on the heavy bag and toothy, "yes boss!" smiles at Eastwood's underhandedly encouraging rebukes, Swank's impossible-to-deter pugilist (who lives in a ramshackle slum and waits tables in a dumpy diner by day) does rise through the compact ranks of women's boxing, where a "former prostitute out of East Berlin" is the dirty-fighting Mike Tyson of the sport. In fact, when she hits her stride, Swank rises a little too easily, often by way of ring-corner motivational homilies and easy-knockout montages that imply she's almost unbeatable (and which lack the rest of the film's visual poetry).

    But the actress's deliberately tight grip on her character's eagerness and personal vulnerabilities lets slip hints of an underlying precariousness that has plagued her entire life. Eastwood is not out to make an underdog sports movie. He has much deeper themes in mind, and one of his greatest gifts as a director is his ability to draw out such themes by lingering pensively on a character's most vulnerable moments.

    Swank, Freeman and Eastwood all have such moments in "Million Dollar Baby," as when haggard, cynical Eastwood returns home from a day at the gym to find an unopened, returned-to-sender letter from his estranged daughter and quietly files it in a shoe box with about 50 others just like it. But it's the parental bond that forms over emotional scabs for both trainer and fighter that drives the less conventional parts of the story, and its stars bring this relationship achingly to life.

    True to the unspoken desperation and disillusionment that toughens or chews up career-undercard boxers, tinged with post-feminist complexity and rich with classical metaphor, "Million Dollar Baby" has only one competitor for the title of best boxing movie since "Raging Bull" -- Karyn Kusama's fervent, genre-transcending "Girlfight," also about a female fighter. But in its later rounds Eastwood delivers a stunning left hook that takes this picture in a whole different direction, plumbing the depths of his characters' souls in a way that makes "Million Dollar Baby" easily his best film since "Unforgiven."






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