To call this so called film an abomination of cinema and slap in the face of Sonny Liston's memory (I'm aware memories don't have literal faces, just suspend your disbelief for a moment) would be a perfectly fair statement. The fight scenes were badly choreographed and blandly shot, the performances are all weak, (apart from Rhames who manages to be adequate) at best and cringe-inducing at worst. It's ludicrously cheesy and melodramatic to the point that at times it could have passed for a parody of dramatic biopic's "Walk Hard" style. It's trite and derivative of practically every 1960's urban drama made in the past 30 years, and worst of all it's historically inaccurate. This isn't really the true story of Sonny Liston, and you won't learn any more about the man than you could by reading his Wikipedia article (which is much more entertaining, with a better script, too.), and it's not even a good movie. So basically it's useless, unless you want to get a few laughs out of a badly made melodrama with some unintentional humor (Ving Rhames playing a teenage Sonny Liston with no effort being take to mask the fact that he's about 50 ****ing years old gave me a fit of the giggles, though I watched this movie stoned.)
The movie seems like a parody. With the exception of the Jack Dempsey movie starring Treat Williams, Phantom Punch has to be the worst biographical boxing movie I've ever seen.
The Dempsey movie was alright I thought, the Jon Favreau Marciano one isn't great it has quite possibly the most un-looky like version of Joe Louis I've ever seen
The Dempsey film was average in my opinion. It was extremely bland, and boring at times, but it wasn't laughable or inept.
Never had high hopes for it. It pains me to see all these great stories (Liston and soon Schmeling) wasted on B-level movies with no depth to them. Who's next, Barney Ross?
Boxing stories have no filmic value unless there is some redemption or sucess story at the end, a case in point is the new Micky Ward movie that ends not with a Gatti war, but with the Shea Neary fight because this was a 'World Title' fight:-(
I know, but Hollywood seems to only film Boxing stories as some kind of fairytale, Resurrecting the Champ was a good boxing movie without a typical Hollywood ending Cinderella Man was a good enough story without demonising Max Baer