The Wrestler

Oooh, look at the poigniancy!

So, Mickey Rourke is this wrestler. He's a has-been, used to be a top ranking
wrestler, and now he's older is reduced to wrestling in local rec centres for
the odd few hundred bucks here and there, which he pretty much spends on hair
bleach, sunbeds, steroids and painkillers. Essentially, it's a portrait of a
hasbeen who can't move on from what he used to be, and is instead slowly
killing himself putting himself through ever more serious punishment in the
ring, for ever more diminishing returns.

It's well written, it's well shot, in a low-budget kind of way, by veteren
chucklemeister Darren Aronofsky. Mickey Rourke's performance is very powerful,
all the more so because he is, himself, famously a guy who had the arse torn
out of his career, and ended up in professional boxing and got his face badly
messed up. In a way, you end up wondering how much he's acting at all.

I'm not sure what I was supposed to feel in this film. If the objective was to
make you pity the guy, then mission accomplished. However, the tagline for the
film is "Love. Pain. Glory." and I didn't see much other than the pain.

I'd certainly give it 8/10 and a recommendation, but it didn't entirely chime
with me.