'Bleed For This' stars Miles Teller and Aaron Eckhart. It follows the story of Vinny Pazienza (Miles Teller), who is a professional boxer. The film chronicles his rise to fame, a crumbling broken neck injury from a car accident, and his road to recovery.
I had pretty high expectations for this movie. As I've said in the past, I'm a huge Miles Teller fan. He was amazing in 'Whiplash' and 'The Spectacular Now', and I truly think he is one of the more promising young actors in Hollywood. I'm also a huge fan of boxing movies in general; 'Rocky' is one of my favorite movies ever, and 'Creed' left a pretty great lasting impression on me. I really love sports, so I like sports movies in general, but boxing movies are truly my favorite of sports films. With all that taken into consideration, I really wanted this movie to be good, and I wasn't too disappointed.
Miles Teller and Aaron Eckhart are both very good in this movie. I don't think either of them will get Oscar consideration, but their performances were exactly what you would want. Teller really nails it as the hard working, cocky boxer, and he was especially good during Pazienza's recovery period of the movie. Eckhart is also really good as the trainer, who is well regarded by his peers but is kind of down on his luck. Him and Teller have great chemistry on screen, and their relationship is kind of the emphasis of the whole film. That, along with Pazienza's relationship with his dad, are really the two driving forces in this movie, so they needed to work, and I think they did.
I do have some complaints about 'Bleed For This'. This movie is pretty formulaic. It's for the most part a well told story, but the story itself is nothing too revolutionary. I really don't have a bunch of individual problems with it, but the thing that really held this movie back from being great is it's lack of originality. It's a good movie, with good performances, but there's nothing special about it. It certainly won't go down as a boxing classic like 'Rocky' or 'Raging Bull', but this movie is an enjoyable watch, and I do recommend seeing it!
Final Grade: B
