Bleed for This

If there is something new to be said about boxing in a movie, Bleed for This does not find it. If there is something new to be said about incredible true-life tales of survival, Bleed for This does not find it. Does Our Hero defy the odds? He does. Does he climb his way back to success and make an unlikely comeback that nobody could ever have imagined? You bet. Does the human spirit triumph? Of course it does. And you know what? None of that should matter. Predictability is practically a requirement for feel-good sports movies like this one. And yet the good ones let us share in the trials and the tribulations, let us genuinely feel in our bones how hard-won the victories are. But Bleed for This doesn’t bleed, and it doesn’t make us bleed. It doesn’t inflict the tiniest emotional scratch.

All of this is a particular mystery: The true story of late-1980 and early-’90s champion boxer Vinny Pazienza, known as the “Pazmanian Devil,” should be effortlessly inspiring. There would probably have been more than enough fodder for a reasonably engaging film if it had only been about how he fought for – and won! – titles in three different weight classes. But that pales into comparison next to the real meat of his tale. After a terrible car crash in which he broke his neck, Pazienza was told he might never walk again, and that boxing was completely out of the question unless he wanted to actually die in the ring.

Still, he made a full recovery – though always with the increased chance of a fresh injury doing him in – and went back to competing and winning more titles.

This is what must be made perfectly clear about Bleed for This: It’s a movie in which the protagonist spends half the running time in one of those science-fiction-looking medical halos, a contraption doctors screw into your skull, in this case to keep Pazienza’s head immobile so his spine can heal.

This is inherently dramatic and dangerous and astonishing and sort of horrifically wondrous, and hence hugely cinematic. It’s also something that I cannot recall ever seeing before on the big screen, certainly not in a way so central to the story.

Or at least it should be all those good storytelling things. And yet it still feels like we’ve seen everything here before, every beat old hat, every up-and-down nothing but cliché. (Oh, look: Here’s Pazienza in a strip club… wearing his halo.) The hurdles before Pazienza are somehow entirely similar to the hurdles every other movie boxer has ever faced, except this time, we just cannot be incited to care. Somehow, writer and director Ben Younger – with his first movie since his horribly miscalculated 2005 romantic comedy Prime – has managed to suck all the emotional energy out of what should have been a can’t-miss.

Perhaps Younger’s worst decision was casting Miles Teller as Pazienza, because the director clearly doesn’t know how to harness the persona of assholishness that Teller has cultivated onscreen. From the obnoxious teenage alcoholic in The Spectacular Now to the obsessively driven music student of Whiplash, it’s plain that Teller has what it takes to sell us unlikeable characters who verge on abusing themselves to desperate, almost savage degrees, which is precisely what the central role here demands.

But Pazienza as a character here is lacking this: He’s just a selfish jerk who ropes others, such as his trainer, Kevin Rooney (Aaron Eckhart), into helping him risk his life. He even taunts his poor parents, Louise (Katey Sagal) and Angelo (Ciarán Hinds), with his courting of death.

Another boxing story made into a movie, Hands of Stone released in August, told the story of one of Panzienza’s opponents in the ring, Roberto Duran. Duran’s rags-to-riches story – from growing up in poverty in Panama to becoming a world champion – was told with more grit, giving the audience cause to root for the main character despite his flaws.

At worst, Bleed for This squanders the talents of good actors, burying them under mounds of makeup so that they’re unrecognizable, and forces them into a sort of caricature of late-’80s and early-’90s working-class Providence. (The place and the period feelsmore like an over-the-top pantomime than reality.)

At best, the film unintentionally highlights the insanity of a “sport” that’s about nothing more than men beating the crap out of each other, what with Pazienza’s fragile body a punch away from death. A good boxing film finds a beauty and a grace in the sport that overcomes even pacifist skepticism. This one doesn’t.

BLEED FOR THIS (1 1/2) Directed by Ben Younger • Starring Miles Teller, Aaron Eckhart, Katey Sagal• Rated R • 116 min. • At Maya Cinemas , Northridge Cinemas