Phantom Punch (2009/Screen Media DVD)
Picture:
C Sound: C Extras: D Feature: C+
A few films
have featured the great, controversial boxer Sonny Liston before, but Robert
Townsend’s Phantom Punch (2009) is
an interesting biopic that tries to tell his story and has at least some degree
of success. The ever-busy Ving Rhames
plays the man and does as good a job as anyone has to date, showing how his
talent was trapped between racism, exploitation by gangster types and implies
that he would have been a huge, rich success today whereas the sport of boxing
was much dirtier then.
The
problem is that writer Ryan Combs falls into the same usual traps that all
writers who make biography screenplays make and the result is a film that never
breaks free of the conventions that have held back most biopics Hollywood has made since
the 1930s. Townsend does make this seem
somewhat authentic and the recreation of African America’s past is a plus, but
that is not enough to overcome the script.
Still, it is the best work on Liston to date, but it is just not
definitive.
The anamorphically
enhanced 1.78 X 1 image is soft throughout, with plenty of motion blur and was
likely lensed by Director of Photography Jon Dyer in High Definition. Hope the Blu-ray looks better than this. The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix sounds more like
simple stereo being spread way too thin and the volume is only so loud, so be
careful of playback levels and audio switching.
There are no extras.
- Nicholas Sheffo
