Living on the streets of Denver, pushing a shopping cart piled high with all his worldly possessions, the man everyone calls “The Champ” (Samuel L. Jackson) knows he was not the greatest boxer to ever step in the ring, but at least he had a shot at it. After years of succumbing to fighters who ultimately found his glass jaw more often than he landed a winning punch, the Champ went from up-and-coming to mere has-been, with no heavyweight championship under his belt. Now he fights no one but cops and street thugs. Living in the shadow of his former self, this champ is down and halfway out.

Denver Times sports reporter Erik Kernan (Josh Hartnett) knows the feeling. He’s been living in the shadow of his famous father Erik the “Wow Man” Kernan ever since he too decided to be a journalist. Listening to tapes of his old man’s lively radio broadcasts—Erik is aware that he has some big journalistic shoes to fill. Assigned to cover all the bush-league sporting events, he wants a shot and the big time, but his hard-driving editor Metz (Alan Alda) is quick to tell Erik he’s just not cutting it. Rapidly losing ground at work and at home—his wife Joyce (Kathryn Morris) has asked for a separation—Erik is afraid of becoming an absent father to his son Teddy (Dakota Goyo) just like his father was to him. He needs to make changes, to put heart back into his life and into his work . . . but how?

There was a time when boxing was as big any other sport you could think of. It was even able to rival all the other sports, it may not have been as big as say baseball during its hey day but it still captured the imagination of millions of American’s as they followed names as big as the sport itself. That was the difference, the names, the boxers who even an impartial viewer or a non fan would still have known. Mohammad Ali, Rocky Marciano, Joe Frazier, Joe Louis, James Braddock the names echoed in pop culture, they reverberated through our culture. When you look at the sport today, there are no Ali’s who may have just single handedly invented modern day trash talking. Most non partial viewers the non fans could not name the heavy weight champion because there is no longer one there is three and none of them capture our imaginations. Mike Tyson may have been a thug, his ability to box long gone but his name is bigger than those who now lay claim to the title, heck I had to look them up. That is why when you see boxing films they are always nostalgic, they are always looking back at when the sport was exciting rather than now days when there are no names to capture our imaginations.

People want to look back, people want to be nostalgic that’s why the idea of this film works. I mean to see someone who was at the top of their game fall so far that they are living on the streets and not entirely mentally there anymore is heartbreaking and it is also intriguing. I mean how can you not look at Ali and not feel for the man who took so many punches to the head that he lost nearly everything and is now only a shadow of his former self. Once animated and outspoken now barely able to string a sentence together. You have to think how many more are out there, how many former boxers and heavy weight champs are suffering for their profession and if you were to run into one how would you react. Would you latch yourself on and try to catapult yourself by using their story to sell newspapers, would you try to help them or would you ridicule them and maybe even fight them to just say you knocked out the champ.

Resurrecting the Champ is a flawed movie it pulls at you and tries to influence you and it doesn’t do it in a very subtle way. Samuel L. Jackson gives a masterful performance as a washed up and beat down boxer living on the street that is lost in the somewhat mundane film the performance is given in. The performance is almost lost as the movie drags along and loses focus as it spends so much time with Josh Hartnett’s character. The problem is that Hartnett’s character is nothing more than a cliché, a character you have seen a hundred times as the man struggling to find balance in his life and find what is right for him. But the thing is Jackson’s character is the interesting one, the one we want to know more about, the one that is drawing us in and the one that is told almost as a footnote as the movie seems to think Hartnett is the more important one.

This is a shame because it turns what could have been a great movie into a mediocre one. It turns a movie that was able to capture the nostalgia of an age long gone when champions roamed the ring into that of a story of middleclass writer who struggles with what is right and wrong in the view of his six year old child. It gives us a cliché of a character in full force and barely explores that of one who intrigues us and draws us in as we want to know more. The movie is an ok film, it’s just so flawed and doesn’t seem to know what it could have been.

Grade: C+