It is the "easiest sport to film", they note.
"There are two fighters, face to face, in a confined space.
"But more than that, boxing lends itself to melodrama. It is about an individual, not a team, so the writer can focus on one storyline. There is also the backdrop of vengeful mobsters, double-crossing managers and other shady characters that populate the sport."
No disputing those sentiments, but there are other villains I would add to the list. Such as unscrupulous directors and screenwriters who take outrageous liberties with the truth to make a movie based on the lives of real people more suspenseful or dramatic, the better to fit their personal vision of the way those lives should play out.
The Fighter is the tale of "Irish" Micky Ward, the blue-collar scrapper from Lowell, Massachusetts, and his drug-addicted brother-trainer, Dick Eklund.
Ward's real story of attaining a level of success despite obstacles should make for a couple of hours of reasonably engrossing entertainment. And it still might, if you don't know or don't care about the falsehoods woven into the script. But what you see bears only a passing resemblance to what happened.
A sticking point for me is Ward's September 9, 1988, bout with Mike "Machine Gun" Mungin at Resorts International in Atlantic City, where Ward is to fight an opponent, as actor Mark Wahlberg says in the movie, "at least 20 pounds [9kg] heavier than me". And while Mungin, who won a 10-round unanimous decision, weighed 65.7kg for that bout vs 61.6kg for Ward, the disparity was not nearly as immense as the movie would have you believe.
Unfortunately, the depiction of the Ward-Mungin fight is one of the lesser factual travesties. When Ward stops undefeated Alfonso Sanchez in seven rounds on April 12, 1997, the movie indicates it immediately vaulted him into a "world title fight" with Shea Neary. But Ward actually had six bouts spread over three years before he took on Neary, whose WBU junior welterweight championship was about as worthless as Monopoly money.
The heartrending ending of Ward finally being recognised as a legitimate world champ not only is false and misleading, it diminishes the entire film. Ward's ring career was compelling enough that it didn't need to be buffed and polished with a fake, feel-good finale.
The shame of it is that Wahlberg does a nice job in the action sequences.
Then again, I'm accustomed to Hollywood's twisting the truth to suit its purposes.
In 2005's Cinderella Man, heavyweight champion Max Baer, a nice man with a decent heart, is portrayed as a bloodthirsty ogre who has killed one foe in the ring and is eager to add a second fatality.
Instead of giving out PG or R ratings, maybe films "based on true stories" should be broken down into the following categories: "Somewhat true", "mostly untrue" and "there's probably a grain of truth in there somewhere".
