So last night I saw the first twenty minutes of THE BRONX BULL (2014), a theatrical movie about the life of boxer Jake La Motta, that for about five minutes upon its original release disconcerted cineastes and Martin Scorsese by being titled RAGING BULL 2.
It was marketed as a sequel to Scorsese’s classic even though it pretty much covered the same span of time, give or take some years at either end.
This impressive and wholly unauthorized display of gall has evidently been beaten back in the interim, either by legal action or shaming, and so we have THE BRONX BULL, which I watched for as long as I cared to.
Folks, the actors in this thing are talented people — they include Bruce Davison and Paul Sorvino — but I’ve gotta tell you, the film operates as a fine demonstration of the uncanny valley that exists when moviemakers are not quite wholly incompetent but not quite competent either. In the first twenty minutes, there are any number of moments where you as viewer will say, “No, that doesn’t quite work.” Chief among those is the framing sequence, in which the battered post-career LaMotta is called before Congress to testify in a hearing about corruption in boxing, and is asked about the bout he is widely believed to have thrown; at which point he says, “Well, I’d rather start at the beginning,” and we are immediately back in his teen years, witnessing his treatment by his abusive father.
This is so clearly the device of a movie steering itself by brute force, and one that beggars common sense — I can’t imagine Congressional committees that have just asked a specific pointed question sitting still for many detailed life stories — that if you close your eyes you can hear the tap-tap-tap of a screenwriter typing.
Nothing I saw in that twenty minutes qualified as a howler. There were no howlers. But by God, there were many clunkers, and the impression given is that the people involved were **trying** to make a movie, and had **almost** all the skills they needed to make a movie, and were not quite pulling off the trick.
I would not say this of many movies much much worse than this one — and I can only estimate just how bad it is, how bad it gets, because I won’t be seeing the rest. Many movies, even horrible ones, are still movies. You can tell that they’re movies. This is a movie-shaped object.
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