When you think of the best boxing films and compare those to this, it's just missing things (not the cliché training montage though). Some aspects of the plot seem underdeveloped. The running time of only 90 minutes hurts it. I hope they earnt their money back for Jennifer Beal's paycheck because she is hardly in this and any actress could have played her part. Gene Hackman is more of a secondary character, playing the lead's father. The plot moves in expected directions but maintains a certain enjoyable grittiness to it. Scrapes in for a 3/5.
This is a weird movie that felt disjointed to me. I didn't understand why Hackman's character would want Streisand's at all. She leaves him and then when the guy she left doesn't want her back, five minutes later she is back with him. If there was a sequel she'd be cheating on him in the first scene. Almost as puzzling as that, is earlier in the film when Hackman's character (working as the midnight-shift manager of an all-night pharmacy/convenience store) pushes a trolley into the security guard who has his finger on the trigger pointed at a thief...I wouldn't have thought that was the smartest thing to do. Some of the comedy in the store doesn't work and doesn't mesh with other parts of the film. 2 out of 5 at the most.
The best scenes in this are the emotive ones with father and daughter, Hackman and Mastrantonio, discussing the legal case and their turbulent family history. The court case ends up being a bit of a let down and it would have been better if there was more tension in the courtroom between the daughter and father than there ends up being.
I enjoyed the first Thugga project I listened to, but my enjoyment from project to project has waned. He's been pretty much making the same music for years.
Best Tracks: Journey, Mr Lonely
A good thriller with an interesting ending, but it has some portions where it seems like Kevin Costner's character is going back and forth between the computer (that takes hours/days to generate an image) without enough happening. It also takes a while to get going. I had the thought that it wasn't the movie I thought it was, but it eventually takes off. As an aside, the assassins have the worst running technique I've ever seen. It seems like they didn't have to run in the audition.