"My Left Foot" was the underdog crowd-pleaser with a contemporary edge, "In the Name of the Father" was the rousing grand statement, but with "The Boxer" Sheridan has made his most mature film. The characters and their motives are all extremely well developed, and if Sheridan occasionally slips into cliche' (the obvious villain, for example) it's all in service to keeping the plot manageable. The tender love story, too, seems right for a change, and its ramifications (not all good) are well explored. One really has a sense of these characters' histories and how they've changed because of their personal and political circumstances. Danny's struggle to not be "used" by any agenda groups, as he had before and ended up in prison, is interesting, inasmuch as he is the one who wants to determine his actions and their symbolism. The boxer is just as doomed to failure as the brief shining hope for peace he represents. Every character has a great stake in the outcome of the cease fire, and Sheridan does a good job of exploring those stakes. In revolutions, some of the revolutionaries forget the original thing they were fighting for and chose to exist solely for the fight itself. The film is good at showing the difficulty of change, even for those have to grudgingly bury the hatchet of past injustice. This movie gets off to an extremely slow start and seems aimless for the first half hour, but stick with it and you'll get in its groove and be on the edge of your seat by the end.
