The TNT cable TV station used to have these interesting promos, featuring actors describing the stuff of real drama; they spoke of passion, deep involvement in the effort, and other gung-ho hoo-hah.
I wonder what kind of movie this could've been if the folks behind Against The Ropes had watched those promos.
THE STORY (WARNING: **spoilers contained below**)
Jackie Kallen (Meg Ryan) has a head for business and a bod for sin...oops, wrong ditzy blonde. A boxing enthusiast from early on, Kallen was not taken seriously by most of the men in her life; only her boxer Uncle Ray Ray (Sean Bell) saw young Jackie's potential and urged her to not let anything stop her. The other men to whom she listened - her father, her dimwit boss Irv Abel (Joe Cortese), and Abel's boss, mobster-slash-boxing promoter Sammy Larocca (Tony Shalhoub) - all effectively told Kallen she should stay barefoot and in the kitchen, where she belonged.
When Larocca gives Kallen a chance to put her money where her mouth is, she accepts his challenge to take on a fighter that he was discarding from his stable. Determined to prove her naysayers wrong, Kallen discards that fighter herself, and takes on Luther Shaw (Omar Epps), the street thug who gave fighter Devon Green (Tory Kittles) his worst beatdown ever. Kallen enlists the help of her best friend Renee (Kerry Washington), and retired trainer Felix Reynolds (Charles S. Dutton) to promote herself to superstardom within the Man's World of professional boxing. And oh yeah, she'll try to make Luther a champ, too.
THE UPSHOT
There are two kinds of Meg Ryan movies: ditzy blond romantic comedies like You've Got Mail, and hardball gravel-voiced films like Courage Under Fire (well, three and a half, with partially ditzy hardball blonde fare like Proof Of Life, and gravel-voiced slutty blonde stuff like In The Cut. But I digress). Three guesses how deep Ryan's voice was in Against The Ropes.
First of all, you gotta wonder why this movie was made. Yes, Jackie Kallen's story is quite amazing; a woman who was able to crack the glass ceiling in a Man's World, should be heralded. But the blase feeling running through Ropes isn't the best way to give someone her props. Of all the things that seemed pointless about this movie, the most pointless was this: why bother to make a movie about a certain subject - in this case, Kallen herself - only to have the characters whine "why's it gotta be all about you"? Uh, hello, the movie is About Her. Duh.
Given what they had to work with, Meg Ryan and Omar Epps weren't all that bad [there's that phrase again: not "all that bad". Funny how that phrase seems to come up right about this time every year]. Their dialogue was cliche-driven, but not so much so that I squirmed...overmuch. The rest of the actors fared much the same; sad to say, Tony Shalhoub - one of my favorite, most expressive actors - didn't clear the "ho hum" bar. Only Kerry Washington, as Jackie's friend/Luther's girlfriend Renee, peaked my interest. Not only did she get the best line in the movie ("...so you called me for Blackup?"), her relationship with Luther failed to turn the corner into full-on melodrama; something that's rare to see in a moving featuring Blacks, but that's not specifically a Black movie. And I must say, girlfriend certainly has grown up since her turn in Our Song.
Against The Ropes was Dutton's debut as a director (on the big screen, at least; his most famous turn as a TV director was for the highly-acclaimed The Corner). I love Dutton as an actor - Roc was a source of pride at a time when so many other Black comedies were a source of anguish - but this movie was more suited for TV than in the theater. Save for its inescapable violence, Ropes definitely had an Afterschool Special quality to it.
There was scads of not interesting characteristics about Ropes, from its undistinguished background music (the music over the closing credits was particularly bad), to ill-advised boxing close-ups that made all the actors look like rank amateurs, to the Jackie-as-hoochie clothing choices (real-life Jackie may indeed be a hoochie, but Ryan just looked goofy in the clothes she was made to wear). But like so many of its early-year counterparts, Ropes wasn't bad enough to be Bad; just basically unremarkable. Let's put it this way: Rocky needn't worry.
BAMMER'S BOTTOM LINE
Though gravel-voice-ditzy-blonde Ryan showed up this time, and Dutton provided yet another solid performance to add to his collection, there's naught about Against The Ropes worth rushing out to see. This one's a wait-for-the-DVD flick if ever there was one.
AGAINST THE ROPES: 
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Reviews 
Rated PG-13; running time 110 minutes