Journalistic gullibility and personal honesty are the issues at stake in “Resurrecting the Champ,” a movie that might look like a boxing film, but isn’t.
Those are important issues, but they deserve a better treatment than they find in this movie, which settles for easy conclusions even when it thinks it’s making tough choices. The film is a somewhat fictionalized version of a real incident.
Josh Hartnett plays a young sportswriter for a Denver newspaper who walks into a heckuva human-interest story: A homeless man (Samuel L. Jackson) introduces himself one day as Bob Satterfield, a onetime bona fide contender for the heavyweight boxing crown.
It might be a good story, but by writing it up and publishing it, Hartnett finds a mess of complications. These will not be enumerated here, for fear of spoiling anything, but things go sour.
Hartnett has problems in his marriage to another reporter (Kathryn Morris), with whom he has a neglected son. You can bet that these will somehow be related to the main story line.
The film is directed by Rod Lurie, a former entertainment reporter whose first couple of movies, “Deterrence” and “The Contender,” were ridiculous but had a certain pulpy oomph. “Resurrecting the Champ,” unforgivably, is just plain dull.
It has one interesting idea in it, which is that Hartnett’s character, whose father was a well-known sports broadcaster, expects a shortcut to greatness without actually doing the hard work of turning himself into a good writer. As someone points out to him late in the film, if he’d actually studied the subject he was professing to be an expert about, he wouldn’t have gotten into trouble.
This seems like a relevant topic in an age with a lot of very loud, self-appointed experts on everything. But it gets washed away in the movie’s by-the-numbers morality tale.
The supporting cast includes Alan Alda, Teri Hatcher and an unrecognizable Peter Coyote, but Hartnett’s dour personality tends to drag the energy level down.
Then there’s Samuel L. Jackson, who’s much too good an actor to settle for the conception of the punchdrunk boxer on display here. It might be accurate, but it doesn’t ring true.
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