True tale ducks clinch with cliche
There really was a Vinny Paz, the world champion boxer Miles Teller portrays in Bleed for This.
That’s important to know, lest you assume the screenplay was completely made up, borrowing and stitching together bits from Rocky, Million Dollar Baby, The Fighter and a few other pugilistic pictures.
It certainly is an incredible story. Vinny, born Vincenzo Pazienza, was a middleweight boxer struggling to keep his career going — “I got more in me” seems to be his mantra — when he was involved in a serious car crash in 1991 that left him with a broken neck. Doctors said he’d never get back in the ring. He’d be lucky to walk again.
But Vinny surprised everyone, working with coach Kevin Rooney — a former Mike Tyson trainer, but past his prime and slowly sinking to the bottom of a bottle when Vinny first meets him — to mount a comeback barely a year after being pulled from the wreck.
Teller sells the story as the never-say-die fighter, and he’s ably assisted by Aaron Eckhart as coach Rooney, and Ciaran Hinds as Vinny’s stalwart father — when did these two get so old? But the film, from writer/director Ben Younger, deals too thoroughly in boxing-movie cliches to rise to the level of its actors.
Sometimes, Younger tries to duck the tropes: The slow-motion walk toward the ring is upset when Vinny’s leggy girlfriend (Christine Evangelista) stumbles like a newborn fawn; and a training montage, backed by an ’80s rock ballad, gets cut short with everything but the scratchyrecord sound.
But undercutting a cliche isn’t the same as avoiding it completely. Scenes of Vinny’s family watching his big fights on the TV felt like they were shot in the same Boston living room we saw in The Fighter — although as Vinny’s dad roars to an opponent who mistakes their hometown: “We’re from Rhode Island!”
Bleed For This remains an interesting story, though perhaps one that could have used a documentary treatment rather than going the biopic route: Footage of the real Vinny Paz during the closing credits makes the screen pop. Still, give credit to the director for not shoehorning in a fullfledged romantic subplot where none apparently existed.
And chalk up another “plus” in Teller’s resume for an actor whose performances cover the good (Whiplash), the bad (Divergent) and the ugly (Fantastic Four). Vinny spent six months wearing a neck-brace device called a halo, to immobilize his neck while it healed.
Teller not only performs for much of the movie encumbered by this contraption, he makes its removal, sans anesthetics, seem more painful than any mere fight could ever be.
Bleed for this, indeed!