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Critics Consensus: Hands of Stone's strong cast and fascinating real-life story aren't enough to compensate for a crowded narrative and formulaic script.
Critic Consensus: Hands of Stone's strong cast and fascinating real-life story aren't enough to compensate for a crowded narrative and formulaic script.
All Critics (105) | Top Critics (31) | Fresh (46) | Rotten (59)
All this cacophony of backstory ends up being counterproductive, especially when the film tries to convey what makes this fighter worthy of tribute (or forgiveness or reconsideration, depending on your perspective).
Traditional and uninspired, it does an adequate job of relating Duran's story but falls short of providing an engaging cinematic experience.
There are some engaging asides about Arcel's struggles with boxing's dirty underbelly, but they feel like they belong to a different movie. (De Niro's superfluous and soporific voiceover, however, belongs in no movie whatsoever.)
In trying to encompass way too much, Hands of Stone ends up feeling superficial and unsatisfying.
"Hands of Stone" is less like a boxing flick and more like a professional wrestling battle royale with all its different subplots angling for main event status.
It's engaging, sure, with some fast-paced and capable fight sequences.
Only comes out as incompetent at best.
Walking out of the movie I was mostly disappointed, since I felt that there was something there that could've been great, but instead was ho-hum.
Hands of Stone isn't the black eye on the boxing genre, but it presents the genre at its most mediocre and formulaic.
This is certainly no Raging Bull. However, if you can invest in a boxer who is boisterous and bratty, Duran may hold your interest.
... Too many characters, too great a time span, and lack of focus on the main event.
Filming largely in Panama with substantial support from the government, writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz works to tie Duran's popularity with that country's struggle for respect and self-determination in the last half-century.
A fairly solid biopic, Hands of Stone tells the story of professional boxing champion Roberto Duran. While rising through the ranks Panamanian boxer Roberto Duran teams up with legendary manager Ray Arcel to help him win a championship, leading to a rivalry with welterweight champion "Sugar" Ray Leonard. Starring Edgar Ramírez, Usher Raymond, Robert De Niro, and Ana de Armas, the film has a solid cast that delivers some good performances. However, the script doesn't really develop Duran all that well, or make him all that sympathetic. And the plot more or less follows the standard formula for a sports film; with a rise, a fall, and a comeback. Still, Hands of Stone is entertaining and even a little inspirational.
Super Reviewer
The film borders on the melodramatic for way too long, 2 hours by count. I liked the actors and the depth they bring to the film but the filmmaking is forced. You are constantly provided with flashbacks of everything you have seen and that's when he is losing the fight. I have seen pretty much every boxing movie and sadly this misses beats left, right and centre. The writing seems strong so my best guess is the editing where the film seems to have lost its strength.
Hands of Stone has a good story to tell but does it in a very predictable and melodramatic way. The fall of Roberto Durán is portrayed in such a 'Hollywood' way, you have to roll your eyes at the desperate attempt for emotional dialogue. The film goes through so many plot points in rapid session, it fails to tell the important details of Durán's life that makes for a better story. The shaky cam during the fight scenes makes it difficult to follow the action in the ring and they don't seem greatly choreographed to begin with. Perhaps i've been spoiled by films like Creed that came out just last year and that film wasn't even about a real person. Hands of Stone feels like it doesn't have enough of a coherent message to portray exactly what it wants to be as a film. The acting is fine, the visuals of 70s Panama and 80s New York City is great. Hell, you even get a decent Don King impersonation but it is poor writing and a poor narrative that weighs down the film. Hands of Stone is a missed opportunity to cover the life of one of boxing's most influential figures and it's a damn shame.
More than anything Hands of Stone is frustrating because there is clearly a large scale to the film and real ambition from both writer/director Jonathan Jakubowicz and the entire cast, but as is true with many a biopics Hands of Stone tries to do and tell its audience too much in too short a time span inadvertently making the film more about a series of events than the characters participating in those events. In theory this is supposed to be a movie about the relationship between Panamanian boxer Roberto Durán (Edgar Ramírez) and legendary trainer Ray Arcel (Robert De Niro) and while this goal is communicated well enough and understood there are so many extraneous things going on around the two central characters the film becomes distracted by its own plot strands. The word I'm looking for is "scattershot." Hands of Stone is a broad strokes approach to the biopic, but in being so it communicates such key elements in haphazard ways thus forcing the audience to not invest as much as they should or even want to. Granted, the film does certain things right as this viewer in particular had no prior knowledge of Durán or his story yet I was immediately interested in the real life events the film was depicting. That is all to say the film is a little all over the place. This especially becomes true after the film effortlessly builds to Durán's first bout with Sugar Ray Leonard (Usher Raymond) and completes that fight within the first hour of the film. While the film could have certainly told us all we needed to know about Durán through the lens of his Sugar Ray fights and all of the drama those entailed Hands of Stone instead feels the need to go further by not only telling us Durán's story as a boxer, but his story as a Panamanian activist, Arcel's story that deals with the New York City mob and a long-lost daughter even going as far to include Leonard's perspective on certain things. Add in the familial drama that Durán creates and deals in with wife Felicidad Iglesias (Ana de Armas) and their five children and there is enough material here for an HBO miniseries. Unfortunately, Hands of Stone is a feature film that clocks in under two hours and while it carries real momentum in the first hour leading up to that first showdown with Sugar Ray that energy is largely lost in the second half of the film leaving us with a movie that might have been something really special and unique did it not try so desperately to adhere to the worn-out sports drama template. read the whole review at www.reviewsfromabed.com
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