Review of Raging Bull (1980) by Afm185 — 21 Jun 2020

It’s a very good movie. However, it’s not enjoyable for like a single second. Which is odd. The story is interesting, even though I sorta knew what was comin the whole time considering it’s a real life story.

It’s sort of a boxing movie that doesn’t really care about the boxing. There’s no training montage, or big fight we’re all supposed to be anxious for, it’s really just about the main character’s personal life.

Boxing is in the background, it’s part of him, it’s a motivation of his, but all things considered it’s not all that important. And I think that’s a pretty unique factor to this one. Didn’t make me enjoy it any more though, because the entire thing is a bit depressing and hard to watch.

The actual boxing scenes were alright. It was a bit odd to see them reacting to the punches instead of actually getting hit, and they did a good job but it’s still quite clearly fake. Idk how but they’ve done such a great job with this in all the other fighting movies I’ve seen that I’d consider it something of a detriment to the filmmaking that it was so obvious.

The acting as a whole is damn good, there wasn’t a single part that felt unrealistic or anything like that. That being said, though, I couldn’t really point out any scenes that really stood out to me, anything that’ll really stick with me.

There were no truly nuanced lines of dialogue, at least from what I could tell, which is always something I enjoy. I think overall the film doesn’t have any obvious flaws other than that it’s just a bit boring and unenjoyable.

Not to the point that it’s bad, just not great in my opinion.