Considerable risk is required in most life-altering ventures.
Like Orson Welles’ character states in “The Third Man,” the milquetoast-neutrality of Switzerland has resulted in no cultural achievements in its 450-year history, outside the cuckoo clock.
(Read: Safe bets aren’t always the best.)
As Erik Kernan (Josh Hartnett) is quick to point out in the opening scene of “Resurrecting the Champ,” “A writer is like a boxer,” and must stand on his merits and talent alone; there’s substantial risk and vulnerability in both writing and boxing — you’re “exposed” and “alone in the ring.”
Kernan should know.
As a struggling sports writer for The Denver Times covering the local boxing beat, Kernan can’t seem to get a break. His editor (Alan Alda) keeps Kernan from covering any significant sporting event, such as Denver Broncos games, because his writing lacks any visible heart, his articles are filled with “typing,” not “writing.”
Separated from his wife Joyce (Kathryn Morris) and emotionally removed from his son Teddy (Dakota Goyo) to whom Kernan repeatedly fabricates lavish tales of golf with Mohammed Ali and meetings with his “best friend” John Elway, Kernan seems near down-and-out.
Enter Champ (Samuel L. Jackson), a homeless vagrant, replete with dreads and lice-encrusted trench coat, whom Kernan befriends one night outside the local boxing arena. Thankfully for Kernan, it just so happens that Champ is the once-champion boxer Battlin’ Bob Satterfield that everyone in professional sports assumed died twenty years prior. Writing Champ’s story is, in Kernan’s words, his “title shot,” the article that can catapult Kernan from relative obscurity into the big-time.
As Kernan digs deeper into the charismatic Champ’s past, the once-woeful ails of his life begin to fade away. Kernan becomes closer to his wife and son, and Champ’s story becomes a national success, netting Kernan a television gig with Showtime’s boxing contingent.
Everything is going perfectly, and naturally it isn’t going to last — like almost everything in “Resurrecting the Champ,” you can nearly expect when the next “dramatic problem” is going to arrive.
What remains following the “big-reveal,” — which anyone that has seen trailers for “Resurrecting the Champ” can surmise almost instantly — is a near epic-length resolution that spans almost 30 minutes, with tension dissipating almost immediately after the major revelation. As such, the remaining screen time is left with little to accomplish aside from tying up its loose ends and offering the expectedly forced happy ending.
Screenwriters Michael Bortman and Allison Burnett pull many major punches (no pun intended) and leave the characters lightly chastised, but all the better for their mistakes. By sparing the rod, the film spoils any real impact on the lives of its characters — or the audience.
“Resurrecting the Champ” hits all the right notes at all the right times, but much like its protagonist Kernan, it feels slightly warmed-over, lacking in the necessary “heart” or innovation that would otherwise make it memorable.
To stress, there’s nothing structurally or technically wrong with “Resurrecting the Champ.” Samuel L. Jackson delivers a memorable performance as the nuanced Champ, and Josh Hartnett’s Kernan is impeccably good-natured, if not overwhelmingly na’ve for a Columbia-grad-cum-pugilistic-sports-journalist.
And with well-worn turns by Teri Hatcher (as the rough Showtime exec that carefully laces her conversations with sexual metaphors and innuendo) and Dakota Goyo (Kernan’s son Teddy, whose dialogue feels so dismally blas it’s almost laughable), “Champ” gives the audience almost everything it has come to expect.
But what keeps the film from achieving the height of its potential is the perpetual safety of its narrative moves.
By sticking to the book, “Resurrecting the Champ” fails to offer anything new, which in the end makes for a safe bet, but not necessarily a knockout.
