Play It to the Bone (1999)

This is one of my favorite sporting films of all time. Simply because it doesn't try to go over board with fighting, or make this out to be simple boxing movie with no plot.

Play it to the Bone, is about two best friends, who happen to be two boxers who once were great fighters and potential contenders for the title shot.

As luck would have it, the two friends get a chance to face each other and fight not only for some money, which they both need as both of them are pretty broke, but also the winner gets a title shot.

This film is about friendship, courage and one's faith in himself more then it is about sports or boxing. Now, don't get me wrong it has some nice boxing scenes and both Woody Harrelson and Antonio Banderas do an excellent job as boxers, and friends and have really great chemistry together. The two are also very good at comical moments and know how to be funny, which gives this film some needed laughs and makes it that much more enjoyable.

I would definitely recommended this film to any one and every one, who likes comedies, actions, sports, drama or simply feel good movies.

Fmovies: A good movie for much of the way, worth watching largely for the interplay between the three leads. Harrelson, Banderas, and Davidovich have great banter during the road trip to Vegas from LA. The fight itself is enjoyable as boxing matches go, but the movie put itself in a bind in how it framed the two fighters, and the conclusion is a bit predictable. The ending of the movie is a bit anti-climactic. A good movie to watch as a TV movie when you have some time to kill. You get to see which actors were on the rise at the time and who the producers thought would be big celebrities. For example, getting Kevin Costner was a big deal in the '90s, though by 1999 his star was beginning to fade. On the whole, a middling movie.

This film isn't much. Dumb plot, few laughs, and a good boxing bout between two men who were given a second chance to show the people that they got what it takes to become a champ. Neither of them walk away a winner- (predictable) but instead walk away with a newly improved friendship. This is surely a forgettable film, but doesn't fail to entertain. If you go to Blockbuster at 9:00 on a Friday night and 2/3's of their movies are rented out. Rent this one...Its good for a few laughs. 5.8/10

Play It to the Bone fmovies. Here we go on the old merry-go-round again. A great premise, an attractive cast, a solid director, and ultimately, a bad combination. I myself had been salivating at the idea of Woody Harrleson and Ron Shelton teaming up again. And they say good things come to those who wait ... NOT TRUE!!! The only person who packs a punch here is Lolita Davidovich, who provides the ONLY reason that one would want to see this movie. Mr. Harrleson and Mr. Banderas have both proven that they have screen charisma, and they have it here too, but they are not given much good dialogue nor understandable actions to undertake, so Ms. Davidovich (especially in the red-dress scenes) easily knocks them both out of her way. If you want to see Mr. Harrleson, go rent THE PEOPLE VS. LARRY FLYNT, or turn on a re-run of CHEERS. For Mr. Banderas, rent DESPERADO and THE MASK OF ZORRO. For Mr. Shelton, rent WHITE MEN CAN'T JUMP (his previous collaboration with Mr. Harrleson), BULL DURHAM, COBB (also with Ms. Davidovich and with a super performance by Tommy Lee Jones as the original SOB himself), or TIN CUP. For Ms. Davidovich, rent BLAZE.

With the Tyson fight coming to Vegas, organisers Hank Goody and Joe Domino have put together quite a few big names on the undercard. However when one of their fighters turns up drugged out with two hookers and his opponent is pronounced dead at the scene of a car accident, they are forced to try and rustle up two fighters with a few hours notice and turns to friends Vince and Cesar. Taking the offer, the friends set off with Cesar's girlfriend to make the trip to Vegas for the fight – a trip that sees them learning more about one another while also trying to prepare to try and knock each other out.

I looked at the cast list for this film and wondered why such a film had managed to come and go in the UK without me even having heard of it. So many well-known actors, a big sports director and loads of star cameos – surely it must be great, well, in a word, no. This is not to say that it is awful because it isn't, it is just that the writing is nowhere near good enough to sustain the film and as a result the film is never engaging on any level. The film has a fight over the final 30 minutes, including set up, but the majority of the film sees us riding in the car with the three main characters. This focus puts a lot of onus onto them as characters and their stories to be interesting and engaging – the dynamics and the history in that car needs to be the edge, to be the hook that kept me interested. It has its interesting stuff but major things like Grace's relationship with the two men but it doesn't do anything with it whatsoever. Even during the fight her split emotions are made very clear but the actual script never bothers to develop it or make it more than very obvious padding. Sadly the majority of the dialogue was just bickering that didn't develop the characters at all and made their stories just fall flat in the telling because we don't really care about them. Bickering, as White Men Can't Jump showed us, can be fun when it is delivered as a source of comedy but here there are no laughs because it doesn't seem to want to be a comedy either. Its target seemed to have been a character sports film with laughs – but it pretty much misses all of those.

This is not to say that the actual fight isn't fun because it is pretty enjoyable if you like that sort of thing. Yes it is all a bit unrealistic but it is pretty exciting at points and only gets silly at key moments. It isn't a great fight but it is at least a relief to get away from the empty bickering of the majority of the film. Sadly it ends on a low point and then drags back into the empty script again for about 10 minutes before just ending without really telling us anything. Physically Harrelson and Banderas both look good – although Woody looks the buffest and is an imposing presence. Sadly he just plays his usual character and, without the material, he is exposed. Banderas tries harder to bring some character out in his role but he is just shadow boxing because the script is not there with him. Davidovich is OK but it is evident that she had no idea why her character feels for both the men or why it is so persistent – nor does she know what to do with it and, although light and fun, she alone cannot add substance. Lucy Liu is annoying and seems only there to fill time, flash flesh and fake an orgasm for the audience. Sizemore is fun but obvious, as is Wagner but both men are very underused. The cameos all roll in at the end of the film but other than saying 'oh look it's' they don't really add anyt

A boxing film from minor or no league sports milieu chronicler Ron Shelton (Bull Durham, White Men Can't Jump) with the not exactly untested talents of Antonio Banderas, Woody Harrelson, Tom Sizemore, Robert Wagner, Richard Masur, Lolita Davidovich and Lucy Liu. What's wrong with this picture? Nothing once you get to the last third and the actual fight ensues. It's the first 90 minutes that's not quite a knock out. In our overly commercialized and celebrity athlete obsessed world culture, Shelton has made a career out of showing us the world of the also-rans (and jumped and hit and thrown, etc.). For every record breaking multi-millioned contract holder making even more telling the world to guzzle the Gatorade, there's a hundred guys like "Durham's" Crash Davis trying to eke out one more season before taking a job at the sports shop or hardware store. This is "Bone's" big stumble, not really establishing what kinda of lives these two has-beens lead now that they are reduced to working as sparring partners at a no-name local L.A. gym. Shelton would have written this a whole lot smarter if he had picked a venue he knew better back east, say New Orleans or St. Louis for Banderas' Cesar and Harrelson's Vince to hail from. It would have made the road trip a helluva lot more interesting visually, moving through prairie to mountains to desert. Instead, we get dried brush and rocks as back drop for Cesar and Vince's back and forth that is supposed to tell us who they are. And who they are isn't all that interesting, which is what's going to doom this film with audiences. This is story that starts off in the most contrived way. In a chain of events that starts with the undercard of a Mike Tyson fight in Vegas getting hopelessly stoned and haplessly dead, respectively, we are then asked to believe that the promoter would even in panic call two guys who don't even really fight any more. The film really needs the audience to believe and believe in these guys after this and Shelton fails to make Vince and Cesar unique enough. People might plunk down their eight bucks for a flick with stupendous special effects, but a great fight? Which is the one thing that "Play It To The Bone" has - a helluva fight. For filmgoers who thought the book had been written on showing a boxing match with either the high art stylization of "Raging Bull" or the pop art sequences of the Rocky franchise, prepare for the most brutally realistic display of the sweet science yet shown. In a sequence that uses a refreshing paucity of slow-mo shots, we are taken through ten rounds of sympathy-welt-raising fisticuffs. At least we know the time Shelton didn't spend on researching his characters wasn't wasted hobnobbing with Tyson and the other real-life boxing personalities who pop up in cameos during this section. It was spent watching God knows how many hours of old boxing film.

The sequence also manages a subtle commentary on the empty spectacle of such "event" sporting events, as the oblivious main event crowd gets sucked into Vince and Cesar's career defining contest. Here's what a boxing match is supposed to be about: two hungry guys out to prove they are top dog. And right up to the conclusion Shelton is on his way to making the first uninspired 90 minutes disappear - then he pulls his last punches and ruins it. This is when the anemic character develpment and unorginality catches up with him. The audience feels sucker-punched going out the door.