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 Hands of Stone 

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 Hands of Stone 
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Post Hands of Stone
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Hands of Stone is a 2016 American-Panamanian biographical sports film about the career of Panamanian former professional boxer Roberto Durán. It is directed and written by Jonathan Jakubowicz, and based on a book by Christian Giudice. It stars Édgar Ramírez, Robert De Niro, Usher, Ruben Blades, Ellen Barkin, Ana de Armas, Oscar Jaenada, and John Turturro. The film was produced by Jay Weisleder, Carlos Garcia de Paredes, Claudine Jakubowicz, and Jonathan Jakubowicz. The film premiered at Cannes on May 16, 2016 and is scheduled to be released on August 26, 2016, by The Weinstein Company.

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Tue Aug 23, 2016 12:35 am
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Post Re: Hands of Stone
While it's not laughable like last year's awful Southpaw, you can't escape an ultimate feeling of 'been-there-done-that' with this movie - it brings nothing new to the table and ultimately ends up being quite dull by the end. It also feels like a lot was left on the cutting room floor, scenes just happen kind of haphazardly throughout and a lot of stuff moves way too quickly. You're really kind of just thrown into it with the characters of Duran and Arcel, and their relationship is never fully developed to the point where the end is emotionally satisfying. The boxing scenes are fine but workmanlike and far from how effective Creed was a few months ago. I did think it was an interesting and authentic choice for most of the movie to be in Spanish (I'd say 60-70% of the movie is subtitled), and all the actors do a decent job - there's not a bad performance in the bunch and I thought Usher delivered a surprisingly strong turn here. Bigger name actors such as Ellen Barkin and John Turturro are relegated to side roles they could play in their sleep at this point - and with Barkin in particular it feels like most of her arc was edited out. This may please some boxing fans or fans of the actual people the story is based on, but it's too forgettable to care otherwise. C


Tue Aug 23, 2016 8:50 am
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Post Re: Hands of Stone
How are Ana de Armas and Jurnee Smollett-Bell?


Tue Aug 23, 2016 12:26 pm
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Post Re: Hands of Stone
Ana is good though her character kind of falls into that typical "wife of an athlete" plot archetype in the final stretch.

Jurnee Smollett-Bell isn't in the movie enough to make an impression. She has like two scenes with Usher one-on-one and the rest of her role is mostly her cheering on boxing matches from the sidelines.


Tue Aug 23, 2016 1:35 pm
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Post Re: Hands of Stone
Thanks and yeah, overall it does sound like just average fodder then.


Tue Aug 23, 2016 9:23 pm
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Post Re: Hands of Stone
The boxing drama Hands of Stone benefits from an interesting subject (celebrated, infamous Panamanian fighter Roberto Durán) and a very strong cast, but it is undermined again and again by trite and/or unfocused storytelling. The film displays an incredible inability to ignore a tangential detail or let a peripheral subplot go unexplored. Simply put, it does not know when to stop. The viable heart of the picture is Durán's journey from extreme poverty and street fighting to the posh height of Madison Square Garden—a story of fury and hope evaporating into cynicism and decadence ("no más") and then finding shape again—and its adjacency to the Panama-U.S. dispute over ownership of the Panama Canal. But rather than diving entirely into this pugilist-as-product-of-colonialism arc and its tensions, Hands of Stone also devotes a significant amount of time to Durán's trainer's personal life—a past conflict with mob bosses, his estrangement from his drug-abusing adult daughter—and even opponent "Sugar" Ray Leonard and his wife. The intention may be panoramic, but the execution is busy and disorderly. At times, it plays as three biopics crowded into a small ring and told to fight to the death; a byproduct of this is a heavily compressed sense of time, with years vanishing in a bland whirlwind of montages and newspaper headlines. Softening the blow is the strength of the acting. Édgar Ramírez captures Durán's overcast magnetism, his salt-of-the-earth virility, without ignoring or blunting his capacity to be an almost monstrous egoist and philanderer. There is a rather sad sense his emotional and physical commitment to the role deserves a stronger overall picture. R&B superstar and part-time actor Usher Raymond IV is well-cast as the media-seducing, nimble Leonard. And Robert De Niro, sporting an unflattering Lyndon B. Johnson hairline, delivers a tough-yet-avuncular performance more in line with his legendary stature than other recent outings.

C+

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Thu Sep 01, 2016 1:46 am
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Post Re: Hands of Stone
De Niro's daughter is such a bizarre character. I do not believe she even has a line of dialogue after the hospital scene. She is just a total plot point...yet to even call her a plot point implies an importance to the plot which is not there. We never even particularly understand how he feels regarding her situation beyond a vague suggestion of guilt/regret. If the film was trying to push a, "Bad-father trainer finds redemptive surrogate child in hungry young boxer" type of angle, it badly, badly fails due to laziness and a sense of over-editing or under-writing.

Oh, and I loathed the "lovably-eccentric" character in Roberto Durán's inner circle. The film is oddly ambivalent re: his creepy-leaning, Fagin-esque relationship with the neighborhood children. For me, it was almost comic relief when he is wiped out by a tractor-trailer...which is another out-of-nowhere, why-is-this-in-the-final-edit? scene.

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Thu Sep 01, 2016 1:50 am
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Post Re: Hands of Stone
There is a good, maybe even great movie in here somewhere. The problem is that the middle portion of the film, Duran's crisis, is where the movie lets itself down. It gets bogged down in cliches and laziness. In what amounts to pretty much a throwaway line (so much so that I don't even remember it) Duran says that (paraphrasing) he grew up with nothing, was always hungry, and now that he has everything he just wants to enjoy it. Great. But that can't be what the whole second act is and it can't set up his redemption. I needed a little more than that. I should've left this film knowing more about Duran than I did heading in (which was next to nothing, except for "No Mas"). I didn't. For a film that claims to be based on the life of Roberto Duran, that's a problem.

C

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Thu Sep 15, 2016 7:00 pm
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Post Re: Hands of Stone
David wrote:
De Niro's daughter is such a bizarre character. I do not believe she even has a line of dialogue after the hospital scene. She is just a total plot point...yet to even call her a plot point implies an importance to the plot which is not there. We never even particularly understand how he feels regarding her situation beyond a vague suggestion of guilt/regret. If the film was trying to push a, "Bad-father trainer finds redemptive surrogate child in hungry young boxer" type of angle, it badly, badly fails due to laziness and a sense of over-editing or under-writing.

Oh, and I loathed the "lovably-eccentric" character in Roberto Durán's inner circle. The film is oddly ambivalent re: his creepy-leaning, Fagin-esque relationship with the neighborhood children. For me, it was almost comic relief when he is wiped out by a tractor-trailer...which is another out-of-nowhere, why-is-this-in-the-final-edit? scene.


Maybe it's just my respect for De Niro getting in the way, but I thought a movie about Arcel would've been a lot more interesting than a movie about Duran. His daughter, his dead wife, his ties with the mob, etc.. There's so much interesting material here that just gets glossed over (not including the things the film introduces about both Duran and Arcel yet still manages to gloss over).

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Thu Sep 15, 2016 7:04 pm
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Post Re: Hands of Stone
I like Edgar Ramirez in this, he's the highlight and deserved a better film. Everything else feels so amateur hour. From script to story telling and the very poor shot boxing scenes in my opinion. The one nice shot I thought is when everything freezes at the stand-off right before the Duran-Leonard fight. It also seems they really weren't sure which story they wanted to tell (Arcel's or Duran's) and finally I found it a bit more of a mess all together. It was nice to see Ellen Barkin in another role though.

C-


Tue Mar 28, 2017 1:28 am
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Post Re: Hands of Stone
I watched this on the plane and was censored because of it, which was annoying, but I don't think I'd like the film much more in it's original form. I couldn't be bothered to find out anyway.


Tue Mar 28, 2017 1:32 am
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