Sorry but I was really unimpressed with this tale of the life of legendary boxer Jake La Motta. It's based on his own book, so it can be relied upon to be authentic, but somehow this Martin Scorsese effort just fell flat for me. The usual mix of Robert De Niro (La Motta) with probably the least versatile actor I have ever seen on screen, Joe Pesci, as his brother Joey; Cathy Moriarty as his wife Vickie and an ensemble of Italian American co-stars just reminded me of a very much weaker "Midnight Cowboy" (1969). Sure, that's not about boxing - but I'm not too sure how much this is about it, either. There is precious little by way of ring action - though what there is is excellently and intensively photographed - for the most part it is more of a soap opera, backed up with loads of expletives and a bit of domestic violence that seems to have come to epitomise the attitudes this New York community have for their womenfolk. There is the usual gangland, fight-fixing, shenanigans but somehow it all comes across as remarkably sterile. I don't really rate De Niro as an actor. Like Pesci, he only really seems to have one gear; one style and it all usually involves him playing well to his own roots, armed with a ripe vocabulary and lots of angry tantrums. At times it is shot like a television movie; the black and white imagery is just too clean and pristine. It seems to be trying for a look that places it contemporaneously in the late 1940s, but instead, for me anyway, it came across more as a film out of it's time. I am certain that I am in the minority here; it played to a very full cinema the other night and received applause at the end, but I am afraid I just cannot see what all the fuss is about.
