Posted: 02/01/2000

Play It to the Bone

(2000)

by Doug White

Ron Shelton’s first film as an independent sleepwalks its way to Palookaville.

If you showed up for the last fifteen minutes of Play it to the Bone, during the final fight sequence, you could possibly imagine that you had missed a good film. Consider yourself lucky, and don’t bet on it. In this lifeless botch, everyone takes a dive.

It all starts with the writing, as they say. Underlying the script is Ron Shelton’s familiar formula: pick a sport, create a rivalry between talented male athletes at least one of whom is just past his prime, add a quirky romantic angle, and then smartly use clichés of the chosen sport as foils for exposition and comic relief. While Bull Durham and White Men Can’t Jump prove the sturdiness of the formula—both films succeeding through committed performances, more or less intelligent dialogue, and a general spirit of fun—Play it to the Bone shows what happens when director Shelton allows the formula to run on its own, without special wit or inventiveness appropriate to the particular story.

For what it’s worth, here’s the setup. Somewhere in Las Vegas, on the day of a Mike Tyson fight, the fighters slated for the opening bout die in unrelated misadventures. Back in LA, as they begin a morning workout, tentative friends Cesar Dominguez (Antonio Banderas) and Vince Boudreau (Woody Harrelson) receive a surprise call from promoter Joe Domino (Tom Sizemore), who is associated in their mind with previous misfortune. Haggling produces a deal in which the winner of the replacement bout gets a shot at the welter-weight title. Figuring to make a score of her own, Grace Pasic (Lolita Davidovich), once Vince’s girlfriend, and now Cesar’s, agrees to drive the penniless opponents to Vegas in her vintage Oldsmobile convertible.

With a sinking feeling, we surmise the outcome of Play it to the Bone long before thefighters enter the ring. This is the sort of film in which the most unsympathetic character, casino owner Hank Goody (Robert Wagner), first provokes our distaste by smugly smoking a cigar. The only character that is mildly entertaining in the entire film is Artie (Richard Masur), a wheezing go-between.

Since Shelton doesn’t bother to explain it in the script, we must infer that Dominguez and Boudreau are so clueless that they don’t even arrange for plane tickets as part of their deal. Most unfortunately, this oversight abets a road trip that is cinematically dull in just about every way. In a desert landscape, as if envisioning the film for television or the internet, Shelton consistently eschews open compositions with depth for mostly tight and shallow coverage. Almost everything that happens on the road is depicted in this tiresome style. Grace breaks up with Cesar, Cesar takes it hard, Vince and Cesar banter, Cesar finally tells about his bad luck at the “Garden,” Vince shares his own tale of woe: it all plays so perfunctorily that adding superimposed titles like “this scene is providing important back story” really would not distract us very much from the “drama.”

Probably, the flatness of Shelton’s direction would be much less noticeable if the three lead actors were at all believable or compelling in their roles. In general, the film suffers dearly for the non-existent chemistry among them. As a fighter who sometimes has visions of Jesus, Woody Harrelson has some temporary tattoos; that’s about all that distinguishes his performance. As Cesar, Antonio Banderas conveys emotion by quickening or thickening his accent, at one point breaking into Spanish like Ricky Ricardo in a fit of pique. As Grace, the two-time ex-girlfriend, Lolita Davidovich seems about as streetwise as one of Charlie’s Angels. (Speaking of Charlie’s Angels, Lucy Liu, a lead in the upcoming film version of the 70s TV series, is especially unconvincing as the hitchhiking Lia, a superfluous character in any case, who squares off with Grace in a parking-lot fistfight, one of the film’s most asinine scenes).

Soulless itself, the film punches up its transitions with a soundtrack of soul tunes, escorting us between plot points. When we finally get into the ring with Cesar and Vince, almost nothing can redeem what we’ve already sat through. Not to worry, though, the film is at least consistently disappointing: sometimes a little better than mediocre, the fight choreography is stripped of its modest energy by stale TV commentary (particularly bad is Jim Lampley, whose smarmy tone suggests someone who is perpetually snickering at an inside joke), stale raps from the corner men between rounds (“Keep focused!”), and remarkably silly cutaways to celebrity reaction shots (Kevin Costner, for example, with mouth agape).

It’s impossible to know if the outcome of the fight is ironic. It doesn’t much matter, though. The fix is so obviously in with this film that subtlety gets utterly lost in all the hokum.

Doug White is a writer and filmmaker who lives in southern California.

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