Originally published on metropolis.co.jp on March 2011

Mark Wahlberg is excellent as the title pugilist in this based-on-real-people story. He plays a promising boxer named Micky whose hopes for a title fight are constantly frustrated by his self-involved mother’s poor management and his ex-pug, cokehead brother’s poor training. This barely functioning status quo is disrupted when his sweet, tough-talking new girlfriend encourages him to dump his family and accept an offer to do some real training in Las Vegas. But good as Wahlberg is, he’s really there to anchor three truly stellar supporting performances by Christian Bale (The Dark Knight) as brother Dicky (Oscar), Melissa Leo (Frozen River) as mom (Oscar) and Amy Adams (Enchanted, Doubt) as the girlfriend (Oscar nom). Director David O. Russell (I Heart Huckabees, Three Kings, Flirting with Disaster) differentiates this from, say, Rocky, or any of a dozen other good boxing flicks with his use of humor, centering mostly on the hilariously fractious family dynamic (Micky’s seven unmarried sisters serve as a kind of heavily hairsprayed Greek chorus). But this he balances with an underdog sports vibe and crowd-pleasing action scenes as good as any I’ve seen.