Against the Ropes

Meg Ryan hasn’t made a very good film for some time now. She seems to be trying to stretch herself, as in In the Cut, which turned out to be simply dumb, in spite of being directed by the acclaimed Jane Campion. She tries again here, in what begins as a fairly standard woman-in-a-man’s-world success story, briefly shows promise as Jackie Kallen, the only female boxing manager in the world, falls afoul of her own celebrity and loses focus on her fighter, then falls apart into a standard underdog-victory sports movie. It’s hard to sell a boxing movie to me in the first place, since I hate the “sport,” and this fell far short. Heart Like a Wheel, about Shirley “Cha-cha” Muldowney, was much better. I see Meg Ryan is going to be in The Tortilla Curtain, based on an excellent novel by T. Coraghessan Boyle. I hope it works for her, because I find her tremendously appealing.