The name of Ray Mancini in the role of Charlie Davis went completely over my head until I managed to make the 'Boom Boom' connection, at which point a whole new set of questions entered the picture. For a real life lightweight boxing champion, Mancini failed to convince that he was the real deal in this picture; he just looked terrible as an actor.
The movie is a remake of the 1947 John Garfield classic, which for my money is a far superior film. The story itself here runs pretty much along the same lines as the original with minor variations. In this one for example, Charlie's mom (Nance Robbins) is supportive of his decision to become a boxer (see my summary quote above), while in the earlier picture, Charlie's mother (Anne Revere) was a humorless individual who didn't abide by his chosen profession. Garfield's Charlie was basically just a street punk, who went through the same routine of gambling, drinking and womanizing before finally coming to his senses.
So where I thought the boxing promoter's cut of his fighter was exorbitantly excessive at fifty percent in the 1947 film, Alex Dumas ups the ante here by taking thirty percent to promote, another thirty to manage, and then takes expenses out on top of that!!! I have to say, Joe Mantegna was a pure creep in this flick as the smarmy promoter Dumas. I couldn't believe it at one point when he actually mocked the idea of being a champion, seeing as how he called the shots in his own little kingdom in Reno. It seemed as if boxing didn't even exist outside the environs of his domain.
As for the rest of the support cast, I couldn't really get my head around the character of Charlie's girlfriend Gina (Jennifer Beals), coming out of nowhere as the directionless hitchhiker and hanging around in the Reno nightlife. She was about as convincing as Rod Steiger's Johnny Ticotin, who became Charlie's trainer. In that regard, he couldn't hold a candle to Burgess Meredith's Mickey Goldmill in the Rocky franchise. As far as Michael Chiklis goes, the less said the better.
For this viewer, this just didn't have the feel of a boxing movie, much less a good one. It had the elements obviously, but just didn't come together to seem credible at all. At least Charlie managed to go out on his own terms following the final fight against El Raton Casilios. I liked the idea that he added a couple new letters to the name of the sleazy promoter, changing it from Dumas to Dumbass.
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