The Bronx Bull

I watched this movie that had some fairly well known actors in it and you would think it was their first role, the acting was so awful and wooden it beggars belief, the directing and producing was also equally awful, this had the potential to be so much better and it fails on every front, the story is all over the place, it jumps from one gap in Lamotta's life to another without bringing any of the parts to a meaningful conclusion, in the end you just give up with trying to follow it and feel like one of Lamotta's opponents, thoroughly demoralized and beaten.

2 out of 10, don't bother watching, Go and re-watch De niro's raging bull

I bought a glut of DVDs and some Blu-rays from a Dollar Tree. The Bronx Bull was one of them. Compared to what I bought, this was much better than a majority of the Dollar Tree blind buys. If you want to know what happened to Jake LaMotta after Raging Bull, you might have an interest in this film.

One thing about this film interests me. The film makers make a reference toward a forgotten film, Cauliflower Cupids that Jake was featured in. But there wasn't any mention of another film Jake was featured in titled Confessions of a Psycho-Cat. Blasphemy!

Not as bad as other reviewers say it is, but most likely this film will be forgotten in a few years.

Biopic starts with Lamotta testifying at a hearing on corruption in the fight business, skips back to his street fighting boyhood and his father's "tough love" to make him into a professional boxer, then jumps to his difficulties adjusting to ordinary life after being a star multiple time world middleweight champion. Good opportunity for character actors to really take the spotlight and shine, and they avail themselves to full advantage, with deep characterizations and good interactions.

Good watch.

I'm not quite as enthralled with Raging Bull as I was years ago. Mostly because it is a pretty stark depiction of a violent man. However, Raging Bull still holds up as a great movie.

Anyway, I threw The Bronx Bull into my Netflix as queue filler, not expecting much. And not much is exactly what I got.

I will say The Bronx Bull did make a smart choice in avoiding the years of LaMotta's that Raging Bull covered. To try and remake Raging Bull would have been foolish. Thus, The Bronx Bull storyline concentrates partly on LaMotta's pre-professional boxing years and largely on LaMotta's life from the 1960's through the 1980's.

With Raging Bull, the production spent a visible amount of time and money recreating New York City circa late 1940's through the early 1950's, with plenty of location shooting. The Bronx Bull fails to capture any of the flavor of NYC because many of the exterior shots look like they were filmed on non-descript studio backlots.

Raging Bull also kept the scope small in terms of the characters. The story concentrated the focus on Jake LaMotta, his second wife Vikki and his brother Joey. As a result, the viewer became invested in these three characters and what happened to them. The Bronx Bull has LaMotta interacting with a dozen plus secondary characters, each for 5 minutes here or 10 minutes there. The focus is so spread out you barely have time get acquainted with any of these people as they flow through LaMotta's life, much less care about them. In addition, while The Bronx Bull is populated with a lot of cast members I have enjoyed in many other things, virtually all of them are way past their prime, few of them are even trying in terms of the acting and all are clearly coasting here for a paycheck.

Beyond all this is the story The Bronx Bull has chosen to tell. Granted, Jake LaMotta as portrayed in Raging Bull was a very violent, bleak persona. Perhaps that's how LaMotta really was in real life. However, with Raging Bull, you had the characters of Vikki and Joey (along with the great performances of Cathy Moriarty and Joe Pesci, not forgetting DeNiro as LaMotta back before DeNiro stopped trying and began coasting for a paycheck) along with the wonderfully filmed fight scenes in addition to the location shots. The Bronx Bull largely tells the story of LaMotta post-boxing, depicting him as a still-violent, charmless drunken has-been. Perhaps that's also how LaMotta was in real life after his boxing career ended, but not compelling as the subject of a movie. Particularly since the after the fall period of LaMotta's life had already been touched upon at the end of Raging Bull.

William Forsythe gives a one-note performance as LaMotta, a performance which adds nothing to how LaMotta was portrayed by DeNiro in Raging Bull. I'm assuming The Bronx Bull was made for RedBox or direct-to-streaming. It certainly doesn't come across as a movie with a decent budget. Even within those parameters, the flick just plods along to no particular effect. Forgettable and unnecessary.

On the whole this movie isn't all bad, but if you want to watch the story of Jake Lamotta you have to see Raging Bull. More of the pain, more of the rage, more of the intrigue that was Jake Lamotta. The acting and directing in Raging Bull is miles ahead of this film, but it's hard to compare an A class big ticket movie to something that is a B class limited release feature.

This movie has it's moments, but the shadow cast by Raging Bull is too great to get away from.