Let me say right off the bat, I love boxing films. I loved "Rocky" 1, 2 and 3. I loved "Real Steel" (Rocky with robots). I loved "Requiem for a Heavyweight", the best boxing film that no one has ever seen (with Jackie Gleason, Anthony Quinn and Mickey Rooney). I loved "The Harder They Fall", Bogart's last film. I loved "Golden Boy"(William Holden's first film), "City for Conquest" (James Cagney),"Champion" (Kirk Douglas) and a dozen more.
I'm a huge fan of Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman. This film should have been a home run for me. And it was, until about the last twenty five minutes. This desperately concluded film falls into my category of "Great Film with Terrible Endings." As you probably guessed, I am starting a list for that title and films which will be included are: Gattaca, Once Upon a Time in the West, Mystery Men, Return of the Jedi (which held the #1 spot on this list until it was displaced by MDB) and Million Dollar Baby. Quite a diverse list, I agree.
As a screenwriter, yes a real honest-to-goodness type screenwriter, I know you have to stay within the world/parameters you set up as you walk folks through your story. All four of the aforementioned films violate their own world setup, dragging the viewer out of the realm of story, and back into reality, where they are, at least, going to walk away dissatisfied, and in the end maybe even angry. Million Dollar Baby is the worst on the list.
The story starts off as "Female Rocky" with Hillary Swank doing a good job as a boxer that wants to do whatever she can to succeed. Eastwood plays the old, grizzled, reluctant Burgess Meredith-type manager, who is "not interested". Morgan Freeman talks to old Clint, who, as he sees the boxer's grit and drive, and has unrealized dreams of his own, decides to help her. Female Rocky.
But the movie doesn't stay there. Margo Martindale (you saw her in "Justified), plays Swank's mother. Martindale's character is an absolutely horrible human being, and the subtext that runs through the story, raises the complexity of the character interactions to another level. Martindale is rude, selfish, disrespectful- all things that Swank has to deal with in an attempt to not only overcome the bias of women in professional sports, but the lasck of support from someone that is supposed to care about her. I have long said that the best dramas include the theme of "How do we treat each other?" See 12 Angry Men. All is going well until a huge plot twist takes everything and throws it into a flaming dumpster (no spoilers). From that point, I can't buy off on anything I am watching.
Million Dollar Baby had me hooked and to that point, I thought it was one of the best boxing films I had seen, which makes the character violation at the end even more egregious. Naturally I wrote what I thought would be the appropriate way to end the film (just like I did with Jedi, because writers write), and thought that my ending would have been obvious. OK, it wasn't. And it wasn't my story. And it wasn't my film. Yes it cost $30 million, and yes it grossed $216 million, and yes it won 4 Academy awards, and, and, and. One final note, the boxing commissions in The U.S.A. have rules about how fights are to be fought regardless of the country of origins of the fighters. It seems that the writers of MDB either ignored this or forgot about it.
IMDB says 8.1/10. Until the ending, I agree. GBU Films says 4.1/10.
The end hurt the film that badly.