By Preston Wilder
How can a boxing movie still seem fresh, after so many fine boxing movies from Raging Bull to Creed and beyond? Hands of Stone has a bold and potentially gripping approach, based around the principle that – to quote veteran trainer Ray Arcel, played by Robert De Niro – “it’s all in the head”. It tells the tale of Roberto Duran (Edgar Ramirez), a Panamanian world champion who had no particular drama in his career, no Mike Tyson-style ear-bitings or rape convictions: he won because he was hungry to win, then he lost that hunger – he still had his boxing skills, but his head wasn’t right – and so he lost. Boxing, as Mr Arcel succinctly puts it, is “brain over brawn”.
This is not a new idea, in fact it underlies every boxing movie ever made – but it’s still intriguing for a film to base itself so explicitly on a fighter’s psychology. The trouble with Hands of Stone is that it needed way more psychology. About a third of the way in, there’s a montage showing Duran’s quick progression in the mid-70s, when he won a lot of fights and sired a lot of kids with his wife Felicidad (Ana de Armas, from War Dogs) – and we learn that he named all his sons Roberto, after himself, which I admit took me by surprise. This is not the opening scene; we should know our protagonist pretty well after 40 minutes – yet there’s nothing in that first act to suggest such outrageous vanity. Actually, there isn’t much there at all, just generic struggles and a hardscrabble childhood.
Duran grew up poor, a slum kid and petty thief. A boxing coach happened to be watching just as he knocked out some other kid, which became his passport to a boxing career. He had natural talent; Arcel admits as much (the film is helped along by his voice-over, De Niro sounding audibly bored as he offers such gems as “Duran had many teachers in his life”), and it’s doubtless true but not too dramatic, let alone personal. Lots of boxers – most of them, in fact – are good boxers. For this film to work, we need to know more about this particular boxer, Duran as a person, but neither his courtship of Felicidad (“We come from different worlds,” she sighs) nor his resentment of America come across as very distinctive. The superficial emptiness of the first 40 minutes extends to the whole movie. Indeed, almost the only personal detail we learn about Roberto Duran – in a film whose very subject is the inside of his head – is that he’s inordinately fond of ice-cream.
Hands of Stone isn’t unwatchable – but the plot is inherently anti-climactic. “I want to rest,” says Duran after he becomes world champion, having paid his dues and made his money. He just wants to live the good life and gorge on ice-cream, and who can blame him? – but it’s not a poetic downfall, like with De Niro’s own Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, more a conscious choice to take it easy. Duran is perhaps best-known for a negative, his 1980 re-match with Sugar Ray Leonard when he famously said (though he now claims he didn’t say) “No mas” – ‘No more’ – and walked away in the eighth round; a movie that made clear why a boxer would decide it wasn’t worth the hassle anymore, all the inner psychological stresses that led to that moment, would be quite a boxing movie. This is not that movie.
Lacking a point, the film falls prey to all the worst faults of biopics. Plotting gets increasingly shapeless, giving Duran a scene with his long-absent father and Arcel a couple of scenes with his long-absent daughter, neither strand leading to much. The actors look increasingly at-sea, especially pop singer Usher (as Usher Raymond) who makes Leonard so elegantly languid he looks like he couldn’t jab his way out of a paper bag. Incident follows incident, and everything happens too fast; Duran’s comeback after his humiliation gets about five minutes of set-up, when he goes (voluntarily) to prison and gets the arrogance knocked out of him in a fight with a convict. Even Rocky’s training montages lasted longer.
All this could’ve been forgiven if the actual fights were thrilling – but in fact they’re dull, partly because Duran was mostly a welterweight and fights in that class are often decided on points rather than by knockout. Still, writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz fails to give them much personality. An early fight against Ken Buchanan seems a bit inglorious, with our hero punching his opponent in the balls, but the film doesn’t treat it as a sign of thuggishness or immaturity; it’s just something that happens. The main Duran-Leonard fight is repetitive, its sole distinguishing feature being that it’s apparently a good fight (“Look at these two warriors!” raves the commentator). It’s just not enough, especially in the same year as the virtuoso one-take fight in Creed. If Hands of Stone were the first-ever boxing movie, it might seem superb; alas, it’s not.
DIRECTED BY Jonathan Jakubowicz
STARRING Edgar Ramirez, Usher Raymond, Robert De Niro
US 2016 111 mins
