If you look closely enough, you're going to see the hired guns of Hollywood hiding on the hills, wearing camouflage, ducking behind the letters and trying to shove a mediocre, studio-ordered screenplay up your ass when you're not looking. There are two types of big budget screenplay, really: the passionate work of art (that's been written by an already proven seller) and the product, written by several hired screenwriters, that's trying to squeeze a buck out of whatever the targeted demographic has been buying into. Unfortunately, GRUDGE MATCH belong to the second category. It's not a bad movie, per se, it's just so meaningless that it hurts. It hurts the Sylvester Stallone fan in me.
Henry Sharp (Sylvester Stallone) and Kid McDonnen (Robert De Niro) used to be the hottest rivals in boxing. The Arturo Gatti and Micky Ward of their generation. Kid took a hard fought decision in the first match and ''Razor'' Sharp knocked Kid out in the 4th round in the revenge, and mysteriously retired before a rubber match could happen. Fast forward about three decades, Razor and Kid are trapped in meaningless lives with nothing but death to look forward to. When Dante Slate Jr. (Kevin Hart), the son of the promoter who robbed them both blind, offers them to finish their business once and for all, both elderly boxers feel the irresistible pull of the game. It's ridiculous, but it's gonna happen.
GRUDGE MATCH is a competent movie. I mean, it's technically sound, acted by competent, workmanlike Hollywood veterans and it deals with issues that really matter in boxing: handling your finances, the damage done by predatory promoters, the loneliness of the after career, these are all realistic issues for professional boxers that GRUDGE MATCH deals with up front. It's a competent movie, but it's kind of lifeless outside a handful of slapstick jokes. It's just that fucking story you've heard a thousand times already about two men coming to term with their regrets. There isn't an original bone in GRUDGE MATCH's screenplay. It's basically David O. Russell's THE FIGHTER, with an absurd sense of humor, to give you a concrete reference.
That was kind of funny, in a Laurel & Hardy way.
Ironically enough, the aspect of GRUDGE MATCH I enjoyed the most was watching Stallone and De Niro box. It's custom in Hollywood that whoever boxes on screen looks like a handicapped penguin. The boxing was bleh in THE HURRICANE, terrible in THE FIGHTER and beyond abysmal in ROCKY. In GRUDGE MATCH, Stallone and De Niro are throwing sloppy, winding punches like old men are supposed to do, but they are actually throwing their hips into it and punching with the appropriate technique. Ironically enough (sic), one of the best display of boxing in a fiction movie is featured in a boxing movie about elderly gentlemen. You know you're not watching a memorable movie when you catch yourself overanalyzing things like that.
The screenplay is what sinks GRUDGE MATCH. It's a movie that attempts to have its cake and eat it too. It's trying to be funny and moving at the same time and ends up not really committing to either ideas. In the end, Razor and Kid were just two other people I was caught with on an airplane. I would've love to think more of a Sylvester Stallone boxing movie that also featured hilarious comedian Kevin Hart, but flat writing will kill and bury just anything good about a movie. GRUDGE MATCH is a movie meant to exploit Stallone and De Niro's last miles and to squeeze a couple dollars out of the warrior culture revival triggered by the UFC marketing machine. It's a forgettable movie at best.