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With one-track mind, 'Undisputed' rams story home
Peter Falk and Ving Rhames star in 'Undisputed'
Ron Batzdorff, Miramax
It doesn't look an inch to the left or the right. There's no air in it, no sense of the routines of day-to-day life or of the world outside. It's a sketch made with stick figures rather than a painting in which you can notice the tree in the lower corner.
Nothing happens in it that isn't germane to the single situation it depicts. It's a battering ram of a picture with a one-track mind.
In such regards it represents the best and the worst of writer-director Walter Hill, who shot the film after co-authoring it — and probably adding the finishing touches — with David Giler.
With "Undisputed," Hill returns to the fight game, played out under unconventional conditions.
We're in Sweetwater Prison in the Mojave Desert, where the undefeated champ of the convict boxing program is the soft-spoken, oddly nonaggressive Monroe Hutchen (Wesley Snipes), who got life 10 years ago for beating a man to death with his fists.
Every movie like this begins with the new challenger crashing the scene — the arrival of a Clint Eastwood or a Bronson.
The twist here is that the hero already is in and the new guy is the heavy.
World heavyweight boxing champion George Iceman Chambers (Ving Rhames), who just got six to eight years for a rape he says (persuasively) was no rape, arrives with the attitude he's the lord of all he surveys.
From the moment he hears about Monroe, the status-conscious Iceman is eager to dismember him. The film builds single-mindedly to the climactic fight, a brutal and unrealistically unbloody brawl in which the opponents wear 6-ounce gloves.
It's no coincidence that Iceman, who is 35 and minds losing valuable ring years, has more than a whiff of Mike Tyson about him. Although the screenwriters toned down Tyson's explosively vituperative style, they build on the premise of a boxing champ being imprisoned and meeting his match among the inmates.
The climactic match is orchestrated by mobster Mendy Ripstein (Peter Falk), a wholly honorable imp imprisoned for tax evasion, who inexplicably has the power to get Iceman sprung just for fighting Monroe. Excuse me, but wouldn't the media be tracking this more closely?
The force of "Undisputed" gives it a palpable visceral quality. The audience that goes at all will feel as though it has been drop-kicked through the tight 90-minute running time.
Iceman has an arresting presence; he's played by the massive Rhames with a typhoon's authority. But the film keeps softening him — a character compromise in this instance, without allowing Monroe to grow in dimension at all.
All of the other cons, whatever their crimes, are merely fight fans here. Quite improbably, they're all pulling for the more honorable Monroe.
The final day's build-up toward the big bout is minimalist, and there isn't a frame of aftermath between the two combatants.
"Undisputed" is an action picture stripped of the accidents of life, reality and humanity.
It has this distinction, though: It's the 2002 movie least likely to woo the date crowd or to be designated with that most pejorative of terms, "chick flick."
| 'Undisputed' |
Director: Walter Hill
Stars: Wesley Snipes, Ving Rhames, Peter Falk
MPAA Rating: R, for strong language
