The Digest
Former Heavy Weight Monroe Hutchen (Wesley Snipes) is serving life in prison for a crime of passion murder conviction. While inside the joint, he has made a name for himself as the undisputed champion in the prison boxing program. In 10 years worth of bouts, he has never lost. This fact is too much for some people to deal with. Especially the newest member to facility - George "The Iceman" Chambers (Ving Rhames), the undisputed world champion in the outside world. The Iceman has been convicted of a rape and sentenced to 6 years in prison - unless he can gain early release for good behavior. But good behavior seems foreign to The Iceman. He comes in a quickly establishes his dominance by beating tar out of people for no good reason and challenging Monroe at every turn. He is violent, rude, obnoxious, and foul - and his only excuse for his behavior is tat he must make everyone respect him or he'll be fighting everyday.
Meanwhile, a fellow prisoner - mobster Mendi Ripstein (Peter Falk)- a boxing enthusiast has gotten it in his head that Chambers and Hutchen need to go head to head. Mendi has enough power to pull it off and after dangling offers they can't refuse, both agree to fight each other.
Each one has their own way of proving their boxing ability, but in the end who is the real champ?
The Dish
I dislike the sport of boxing. I've never understood why someone would allow themselves to get the crap beat out of them. It's disgustingly violent and rather boring. It is because of this, I don't normally watch boxing movies. I've seen moves with boxing in the, but not with boxing being the focal point. I really don't know how Undisputed stacks up against every other boxing movie out there. So, I'm not going to address it from that angle.
Having said that, let me tell you how disappointed I was with this movie. There was so much potential here and was never fully developed. These roles could have been award-winning roles for Snipes, Rhames, Seda and Falk, but the characters were never fully developed and at times completely glossed over. It's almost as if both screenwriters were going in totally different directions. One wanted to look at how each man defined manhood and how he dealt with the complexities of being a man locked behind bars. The other writer just wanted to get to the boxing climax and leave it at that. This constant contradiction made the story uneven and left me feeling unfulfilled. Every time there was a hint of character development, someone would hit someone else and we were right back on the boxing theme. It was frustrating. Then to top it off, the after the movie built to it's boxing climax, the director used what seemed to be a hand-held and we could barely see the fight! That was just enough to make me want to scream. What's the point of building a story around an incident, then not allowing anyone to clearly see it. Plus the filmmakers used grainy film and it just became a chore to watch after awhile.
I also had a small niggling in the back of my head because on many levels I cringed at black men being shown as violent beings once again. But seeing all the different races work together throughout the movie served to erase some of that uneasiness for me.
The Directive
The Bottomline for me is that the filmmakers - not the actors- ruined this movie from the script to the filming. I'd save it for a rental.
Unbearable.
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Copyright Kamal "The Diva" Larsuel-Ulbricht, 2002
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