Hands of Stone

In bringing the story of legendary boxer Roberto Duran to the big screen, writer-director Jonathan Jakubowicz would have been better suited just focusing on a small part of Duran's life.  After all, the best of the recent docudramas have been films like Lincoln or Steve Jobs, films that aimed squarely at a certain moment or parts of the lives of the people they were covering, instead of trying to fit their whole life story into two hours.  Hands of Stone gives us some intriguing moments and some really great performances, but they are let down by the film's muddled and hurried narrative.

Edgar Ramirez gives a stirring portrayal of Roberto, but he often gets lost within the jumbled narrative.  During the course of 105 minutes, the movie tries to not only show us Duran's rise from a scrappy and impoverished kid on the streets of Panama to his highs and lows as a professional fighter, but it also takes time to cover his famous rivalry with "Sugar" Ray Leonard (played wonderfully by Usher Raymond).  But Jakubowicz doesn't stop there.  He also wants to talk about life in Panama at the time, as well as the feelings of the country that the people felt as the Panama Canal was returned to them.  He wants to talk about Duran's family life with his wife and five children.  He wants to talk about how his desire for food and excess almost led to self destruction.  He even throws in a plot concerning Duran's resentment toward his American father who left him when he was young.  With this much ground to cover in less than two hours, the movie often feels like it's checking moments off of a list, instead of actually exploring its subject matter.

Duran's story is actually told to us and mostly seen through the eyes of his trainer, Ray Arcel (Robert De Niro), who not only serves as the film's narrator, but gets to have a subplot or two of his own squeezed into the narrative.  In one of the film's more baffling moves, it gives him an adult daughter from a previous marriage who suddenly shows up hospitalized, even though we have no idea who she is.  So, is the movie going to dive into Ray's estranged relationship with her, and helping her overcome the painful past that they share?  Actually, no, the movie forgets about her as soon as it introduces her, only to have her show up again near the end of the film.  Ray and his daughter seem to be fine around one another by this point, and have smoothed over whatever problems they've had.  Of course, we don't know anything about this, so we don't know how to react when the daughter is trotted back into the story after being gone so long.  It feels like there was a completely different movie focused on Ray's relationship with her that got entirely cut from the film.

Hands of Stone is confused in far too many ways when it comes to covering its subject matter.  It wants to be about so many things, but it doesn't know what it wants to focus on.  Instead, it throws a little bit of everything in.  We get moments with Duran's big personality and how his standoffish public persona got him in trouble with certain people, we get moments covering Arcel's former relationship with the mob (mostly represented with a supporting performance by John Turturro), we get Duran's relationship with his wife (Ana de Armas from the recent War Dogs), how they met, and how their love almost fell apart during Duran's lowest moments, we get Arcel's relationship with his wife (Ellen Barkin), we get a glimpse into the world's view on what was happening in Panama at the time, we get "Sugar" Ray Leonard becoming obsessed with beating Duran in the ring...It all becomes overwhelming, and there were even moments where I lost track of certain characters, and couldn't remember who they were and how they fit into the story for a moment.

The frustrating thing is that you can see a good or possibly great movie struggling to show itself amongst the jumbled pages of the screenplay.  All of the performances are very strong, especially Ramirez and Raymond as the two legendary boxers whose rivalry and eventual friendship should have been the main driving force behind the film.  Trim away all the excessive storytelling, and you could have had a very intimate and personal drama bout two men who were driven to excel, and eventually found a common bond between them.  I know that there was a documentary made about this very subject matter, and maybe the filmmakers feared that they would just be covering the same ground as that film.  Still, the simple paint by numbers approach to this film ("This happened...Then this happened...then this...then this...") is not the way to go.  Not only is it basic and routine, but it never allows us to get close to these people.

You can see hints at relationships forming all throughout Hands of Stone, such as the almost father-son relationship between Duran and Arcel.  But, it feels like we're kept at a constant distance, and the movie never rises to the emotional level it should.  By trying to tackle so much at once, the movie ultimately winds up shooting itself in the foot, and ends up being completely forgettable, despite the best efforts of the actors.

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