The Bronx 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.

It's a biopic of the troubled boxing champ Jake LaMotta (William Forsythe). The story starts with him testifying against accusation of corruption and moves to 1937 Bronx where he's fighting in the streets. After his boxing ends, this troubles continue.

This was sold as the sequel to Raging Bull until a lawsuit forced the change. I can see a good reason for going to court. There is no way anybody from the first movie would want to be associated with this movie. The filmmaking is not even in the same league. It's a bad tracing job like a kid trying to draw the Mona Lisa. If one ignores the greatness of Raging Bull, this would be simply be a low rent indie. It does have some good actors and they do fine work here. On the other hand, the writing is very flat. The drama has no tension. There is no flow. It's just one scene after another. It's recitation of a life rather than a compelling story.

This is my 1st ever review.This movie is so bad yyoull be shaking your head in disbelief.The timelines all over the place and the acting is atrocious.

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.

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