Storyline is formulaic and it tries too hard to wring emotion out of the audience...you can feel the puppet strings.
Comment
02/20/04
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Against the Ropes (2003)
13
%
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:128
Fresh:16
Rotten:112
Average Rating:4.2/10
Consensus: A bland, dumbed-down package of sports cliches.
Theatrical Release:Feb 20, 2004 Wide
Box Office: $5,696,752
Synopsis: Meg Ryan stars in this fictionalized account of real-life boxing manager Jackie Kallen, the first female to ever make a name for herself in the sport. As the film begins she's just an assistant to... [More]
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Reviews for Against the Ropes
A formula movie about Meg Ryan wearing skimpy clothes and uttering dialogue as painful as the heels in which she's strutting.
02/20/04
Against the Ropes is a rousing drama about a pioneering female boxing manager whose gift of enthusiasm is something special.
02/20/04
Easily the worst film about boxing I've ever seen, and I've been trying to think of a sport-related flick equally as unappealing for the last week. I'm still drawing blanks.
02/20/04
Bwooklyn Meg sounds a whole lot like Margot Kidder impersonating Phyllis Diller. The accent comes and goes, but it remains the most entertaining aspect of the entire movie.
02/19/04
Obvious, irritating boxing girl power movie.
02/19/04
The great thing about sports movies is it doesn’t really matter that they’re all the same.
02/19/04
I hate to keep harping on Meg Ryan, but seriously, Meg Ryan, when are you going to be in a good movie?
02/19/04
Even by the standards of pop-moral parables passing for entertainment, this is bland stuff.
02/19/04
Throws the towel in early, leaning on one feel-goody cliché after another.
02/19/04
While Ryan's performance has the proper blend of confidence and cleavage, the movie succeeds only in producing more fight flick cliches than a Rocky movie marathon.
02/19/04
A title card says the film was 'inspired by the life of Jackie Kallen.' Nothing's actually inspired here, from Dutton's haphazard direction to an inapt score by the late Michael Kamen.
02/19/04
Still Oscar-less, Ryan obviously sees Jackie as her blue-collar scrapper in the Brockovich-Norma Rae mold. What she delivers is very different -- an unwittingly patronizing Great Blond Hope.
02/19/04
Top CriticThe script ... is shallow and dumb.
02/19/04
When it comes to keeping the colored folk peripheral, this picture makes To Kill a Mockingbird look like Get on the Bus.
02/19/04
Almost nothing about it feels drawn from real life.
02/19/04
It's an interesting, character-driven film, the story of a woman who has a fight on her hands when it comes to her chosen career.
02/19/04
A workmanlike production that's simply too predictable and too preposterous to hold our interest.
02/19/04
Top CriticFar from a championship movie, but it's fun while it lasts.
02/19/04
Top CriticMost of the characters are one-dimensional stereotypes ... and the climax is a championship bout that's both utterly predictable and out of key with the story as a whole.
02/19/04
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