The tale of the one-time prize fighter falling, or fallen, on hard times is a familiar one. I haven’t been keeping strict count, but I think “Bang Bang” is the third I’ve seen in the last 11 months. Jack Huston’s “Day of the Fight” is a black-and-white vision that’s as much about cinema as it is about pugilism (one clue to that is its title, which is the same as one of Stanley Kubrick’s early short films). “The Cut,” starring Orlando Bloom, is a harrowing and eventually grisly story of a middleweight boxer’s excruciating struggle to “make weight.” In “Bang Bang,” Tim Blake Nelson plays Bernard ‘Bang Bang’ Rozyski, a washed-up ring man who is not, as it happens, looking to make a comeback himself. We can figure this out when we first see him tooling around in a wheelchair.
We also soon learn that he doesn’t actually need the wheelchair. Like the Joe Flaherty SCTV station-owner Don Cabalero, he does the wheelchair bit for “respect.” We will hear him bragging about how, once upon a time, he got plenty of that. And plenty of money. And a lot of attention from women, although he puts it more crudely than that. He puts a lot of things crudely. But he will also, on occasion, say that he’s feeling “peckish” when he’d like to eat. In short, Rozyski—almost no one calls him by his first name—is a genuine character. And as played by Nelson, he’s so lively and prickly he practically jumps off the screen.
Complaining about losing his house, he blames “insects from the bank,” almost hissing with reptilian contempt. He’s reminded of his best days by persistent juicer commercials from Darnell Washington, the guy who beat him in a decisive bout back in the day. (And who almost killed Rozyski’s boxer brother in a fight months before.) Darnell’s not only rolling in endorsement money, he’s also a player in local politics. “My juicers will knock your taste buds out,” he says in one TV ad, eliciting an eyeroll that Rozyski executes with his entire body. He hates Darnell so much that he wants to kill him—he actually attends the guy’s rally with a revolver on his person.
His life, clearly, could use an agent of change. One shows up in the person of his quasi-estranged daughter, Jen (Nina Arianda), and her adult son, Justin (Andrew Liner), who’s gotten himself in a spot of trouble with the law and has some community service to do. The older man tries to understand the kid, trying out the video games he favors. “No wonder there are so many school shootings, these games are hard as shit,” is a typically piquant observation from the man. Nelson delivers this, and all his other lines, with a convincingly flat accent
Looking at Justin’s solid build, Rozyski’s got other ideas than merely looking after the young man. Does he fight, Rozyski asks him. Justin does not. “You wanna learn?” “No, I don’t.” The former fighter isn’t going to give Justin much choice. He’s never coached before but is keen to start. With a former colleague played by Kevin Corrigan, he starts checking out gyms and so on. There’s training. And then a fight.
It’s not in any respect a “Rocky” kind of story. The ultimate showdown takes place in Darnell’s living room, where Rozyski appears in a hospital gown. This sets the stage for Nelson to deliver a credible soliloquy on the so-called “sweet science” and its ultimate beneficiaries. Like a lot of other stuff in this movie, it actually transcends the clichés of the genre while acknowledging those clichés as containing kernels of truth.
