Movie Review Resurrecting the Champ

Resurrecting the Champ (2007) 

Directed by Rod Lurie

Written by Allison Burnett 

Starring Samuel L. Jackson, Josh Hartnett, Kathryn Morris, Alan Alda, Rachel Nichols

Release Date August 24th, 2007

Published August 23rd, 2007 

Josh Hartnett is a young actor who I have really come to enjoy. His work is always complex and never predictable. His performances in Lucky Number Slevin, The Black Dahlia and Mozart & The Whale are three of the best performances by any actor in the last two years. Each has a different tone, a different approach and requires different skills and yet Hartnett nails each one.

For his latest film Resurrecting The Champ, Hartnett outclasses the material which takes a compelling true story and fouls it up with false subplots and an ending far too neat and tidy to be believed.

Resurrecting The Champ is loosely based on a story by L.A Times writer J.R Moehringer. The story of an old homeless man who claimed he was once a heavyweight boxing contender. His stories about Rocky Marciano and Jake LaMotta and Floyd Patterson held Moehringer in sway  for weeks but in researching this compelling fellow, Moehringer discovered a secret that changed the story from one of redemption to one of grand delusions and good intentions.

The movie Resurrecting The Champ casts Josh Hartnett in the role of Erik Kernan, a struggling boxing beat writer for a fake Denver newspaper, The Denver Times. His boss (Alan Alda) feels his writing lacks personality and buries most of his stories. Kernan's wife, Joyce, also a journalist, has kicked him out of the house for reasons that are only moderately clear.

Kernan lives in the shadow of his father, a legendary boxing announcer who abandoned him and his mother when Erik was only 6 years old. He is at the bottom of his self loathing, daddy blaming rope when he stumbles across the champ (Samuel L. Jackson). Claiming to be Bombing Bob Satterfield a one time contender for boxing's world heavyweight championship, the champ as those on the street call him, is now living next to a dumpster behind the Denver sports arena.

Sensing a heart rending sports story that could save his career, Erik implores the champ to tell him his life story and how he went from nearly fighting for the title to being homeless in Denver. His stories about breaking Rocky Marciano's nose and falling to Pretty Boy Floyd are compelling and Erik is at rapt attention. However, the champ has a secret that threatens to take both of them back down to the gutters.

Resurrecting The Champ is a project 10 years in the making. Producer Mike Medavoy bought the rights to J.R Moehringer's LA Times Magazine story not long after it was published in 1997. The film passed between a number of talents, including Morgan Freeman who was once set to play the champ. Finally, producer Bob Yari and director Rob Lurie managed to land Sam Jackson and Josh Hartnett for the leads and Medavoy's Phoenix Pictures finally gave the go ahead.

Jackson and Hartnett are terrific casting. Though Jackson has struggled recently, allowing his bad ass reputation to become something of a caricature, he redeems himself with an immersive performance as the champ. Josh Hartnett continues a series of tremendous performances with complex turns as a feckless self aggrandizer who is forced to confront the emptiness of his own life opposite the life of the champ who despite his circumstances, seems to want for nothing.

The script by Michael Bortman and Allison Burnett mirrors in many ways Stephen Ray's Shattered Glass. Both films are about journalists who find themselves overwhelmed by their own ambition. Shattered Glass is more accomplished, but Resurrecting The Champ benefits from a cast that elevates similar material. Both films are insightful about the pressures of the world of journalism through Glass again has the advantage with a cleaner, linear narrative.

Resurrecting The Champ tries a little too hard to cover a number of complex issues. As if the central story of this homeless fighter and the opportunistic journalist weren't enough, the film ladles on a backstory for each character about fathers and sons and the lengths one goes to be a good father or to avoid becoming a bad father. It's not that this fathers and sons subplot is poorly played, rather just that it distracts from the more interesting world of journalism and this dynamic relationship between the champ and the journalist.

Regardless of some aching narrative problems, including an ending that is far too easily tied up in a pretty bow, Resurrecting The Champ is a compelling character study. Watching Samuel L. Jackson return to form by becoming 'the champ', you are reminded of what a great talent Jackson is when given a good character to play.

His work in Resurrecting The Champ alongside Josh Hartnett is so good that you can't help but get caught up rooting for both characters even as they fail and reveal their flaws. The champ is something of an innocent, having spent much of his later years punch drunk from years in the ring, he is easy to sympathize with to a point.

Josh Hartnett has the more difficult character. His Erik Kernan is feckless, self loathing and a little lazy. When confronted about his writing early in the film we are told he really isn't very good. His own wife evinces only disappointment when she looks at him. Worst of all, Erik feels compelled to lie about his life to his six year old son leading to a scene with former Broncos quarterback John Elway that is painful and embarrassing in very real ways.

Hartnett's job is to somehow bring us to care about this guy and root for his redemption and he succeeds with an earnest come to Jesus series of epiphanies about his life that had me riveted. His character is, unfortunately, undermined late in the film by an ending that rushes past some of his more emotional moments, on its way to a too tidy ending, but Hartnett throughout remains a compelling presence.

Resurrecting The Champ is something of a disappointment in the end. The film aches to be deeper than it is and more complex than it needs to be. The story wraps up too quickly and too neatly. Still, Samuel L. Jackson and Josh Hartnett make a great team and they elevate the material to the point that their work together is worth the price of admission even if the movie itself does not hold up to much inspection.

Movie Review: 'Mindhunters'

Mindhunters (2005) 

Directed by Renny Harlin 

Written by Wayne Kramer, Kevin Brobdin, Ehren Kruger

Starring Val Kilmer, LL Cool J, Jonny Lee Miller, Kathryn Morris

Release Date May 13th, 2005 

Published May 12th, 2005 

Mindhunters was a strange affair. The film was completed in 2002 but did not get released by the late Dimension Films until 2005. Why? Who knows, they probably realized the the stinker they had on their hands. After finally blowing the dust off this crusty little thriller with LL Cool J, Val Kilmer and Christian Slater, the newly, non-Weinstein regime at Dimension films finally dumped the film into theaters. Why they bothered with theaters instead of directing it to the video stores of 2005 where it belonged must have been some kind of contractual obligation. There is no other explanation for why garbage like Mindhunters ever made it to such a wide release.

LL Cool J is the star of Mindhunters-- he must have drawn the short straw-- as a shady cop invited to join a group of rookie FBI profilers on a training mission on a deserted island military base. Val Kilmer is the leader of this little band but his role is little more than a cameo.  And, yes, that is Christian Slater as one of the profilers of whose fate the trailer and commercials spoiled mightily and for no good reason whatsoever.

Joining Cool J at the head of the cast is Johnny Lee Miller as Lucas and Kathryn Morris from TV's Cold Case as Sara. They are joined by a group of other semi-recognizable early 2000s character actors including Eion Bailey then of TV's ER, Patricia Velasquez and Clifton Collins Jr. each of whom line up to be victims of the films serial killer as if they were camp counselors having sex at Crystal Lake. Canon fodder is a kind description of the roles played by Bailey, Velasquez and Collins. 

Essentially this little group is on the island to profile a fictional serial killer who is obsessed with time. The military base is set up as a small town with dummies standing in for real people. The profilers must locate the crime scenes, examine the fake dead bodies and assemble the clues that could lead them to the fictional killer. However, as they quickly find out from the death of one of their own, this serial killer is very real.

A search of the island shows the young profilers are either alone on the island, or not entirely thorough, thus leading to the obvious conclusion that one of them is in fact the killer. As the Rube Goldbergian murder devices unfold and remove one obvious victim after another, it is not hard to decipher which characters are going to survive and which is the killer. Morris, Miller and L.L Cool J all have main character powers so it's a safe bet that they are among the top suspects. 

This mess of horror film aesthetic and  thriller clichés attempts to fool audiences but not with clever plot twists and good character work.  No, director Renny Harlin's weapon of choice is utterly incomprehensible stupidity. The film was edited by Neil Farrell and Paul Martin Smith both of whom are wishing the Editors union accepted synonyms like the Directors union's well known Allen Smithee. Mindhunters seems as if it were assembled from different versions of the script each featuring different killers, victims, and survivors. This owes more to Harlin's baffling direction and Wayne Kramer's script than anything these poor and likely tortured editors did.

The mess extends to the acting and dialogue as well, as the confused cast bounds from one ridiculous setup to the next seemingly unaware of which version of the script they are acting from. LL Cool J, Johnny Lee Miller and the rest of the cast wander about looking at each other and seeming to say "No, I'm the killer!" "No I'm the killer!" "Are not!" "Am too!" and on and on throughout most of the final 30 minutes of the film. And somehow the killer still turns out to be easily predictable.

Mindhunters is a real shame because this is a very talented cast. Catherine Morris appeared to be a legit star on her TV show Cold Case in 2005. On that clever CBS crime procedural, her steely demeanor perfectly evoked her tough but vulnerable FBI Agent. In Mindhunters, however, Morris is thoroughly done in by a confused and disorienting script that may or may not have had her as both killer and victim at different points during filming.

LL Cool J, Christian Slater and Val Kilmer are shells of the actors who have flirted with stardom in the past. Kilmer we forget was once Batman, but he is far from even that flawed blockbuster in Mindhunters where apparently he owed the producers a favor. How else can you explain why he accepted this minor and entirely forgettable role. Mindhunters was sadly par for the course at the time for Slater who was coming off of his asleep-at-the-wheel lead role in Alone In The Dark. Mindhunters came at a time well before Mr Robot came around and brought Slater back to the respectable world of working actors. 

LL Cool J is at least an enjoyable star to head up and ham up Mindhunters and his is the only thing remarkable about the film. LL Cool , even in this terrible movie, had the charisma of an A-list celebrity and that helped him to outshine some of this deeply confusing script that I'm sure featured him as killer and victim and survivor and savior at different points during the production.

Johnny Lee Miller, Eion Bailey and Clifton Collins Jr. were terrific young actors in 2005 who had succeeded in the past with strong character work. Miller was once quite the rising star after leading man after starring with his then wife Angelina Jolie in Hackers and then gave a strong turn in the cult hit Trainspotting. Bailey made a good impression with a small role in Fight Club and a memorable performance in the HBO mini-series Band of Brothers. And as for Collins, his best work was in front of him as he once earned genuine Oscar buzz for his supporting role in Capote opposite Phillip Seymour Hoffman.

Watching this terrific cast suffer at the hands of director Renny Harlin is quite painful. All of this talent and  Harlin can do nothing with it but line them up on a formula horror thriller assembly line and eliminate them one by one until he's done picking names out of a hat to decide who lives and who is the killer. To call Renny Harlin a hack is far too simple. After once looking like a star director in the action genre, Harlin regressed as a filmmaker so much that he went from blockbusters to making movies that no longer see a theatrical release. Harlin hasn't seen one of his movies reach theaters in wide release since he made he vomited Exorcist The Beginning into theaters in 2004 to widespread derision and empty box office coffers.