'Champ' Bobs, Weaves, Misses

But Samuel L. Jackson Brings Punch

"Resurrecting the Champ" is a three-hankie male weeper, full of fuzzy-wuzzy issues. Dad -- did he love me? Sports -- manliness or cruelty? Les gals -- why are they never there when we need them? The Boss -- just like Dad, does he love me? Pals -- fine, as long as they don't do better than me. A son -- he's wonderful, until of course he sees through me, the little fink.

Set in Denver, it's the story of a sportswriter who discovers his ticket to the big leagues (and therefore a banishment to all his manhood doubts) in the form of a big, fat story, which he rides hard and puts away wet. Then a trick of fate intervenes and his ride to the top may turn out to be a one-way trip to the bottom unless he learns to fake contrition and humility fast.

The movie, which stars Josh Hartnett as the sportswriter and Samuel L. Jackson as the story, has the disadvantage of being set in newspaper culture, on a big daily called the Times in Denver. (The film gets so many newsroom nuances wrong that anyone who has hung out in one can hardly watch it, though of course the general public likely won't notice nor mind.)

The film gets off to a terrible start -- ach, I cringe -- with Hartnett, as Erik Kernan, setting what he thinks is a manly tone in the voice-over. "Writing," he (more or less) says, "is just like boxing. In both of them, you're in the ring alone. You're naked." Er, yeah, just like boxing, except of course nobody's trying to beat your head to pulp, there are no issues of courage, stamina, speed, coordination and pain threshold, and if you get tired you can go take a nap, pop a beer, bed the wifey or watch the tube. Hmmm, no wonder that writers say that but boxers never do. Anyhow, you think in the first seconds: If he doesn't see through that self-dramatizing bombast, how can he ever hope to write well?

Erik is stuck as the No. 3 sportswriter at the Times. "I am not impressed with your copy," says his boss, Alan Alda, and when Alan Alda, even in a nice butch crewcut, is dissing you, baby, you be way down on that guy feeding chain. Other signs of his low status: His wife, some kind of Times super-editor whom everyone likes better than him (I know how that feels, believe me!), has dumped him, his son has lost faith in him, his dad was never impressed with him, and he's even shut out of the sports banquet beat. His job is to cover the tank-town warriors trading leather for IQ points in the Mile-High's run-down puncher's venues.

This all changes one night when he sees some kids outside an arena hassling a homeless guy, who turns out to be none other than Bob Satterfield, a ranked heavyweight in the '50s who was once a fight away from a championship bout -- a fight he lost. (Satterfield, incidentally, was a real guy, as the movie is "based on" a true story.)

Now the former boxer is a peeping-voiced, shuffling Denver homeless guy, living out of dumpsters with a late model Safeway shopping cart to show for a lifetime of eating leather and sucking soup through broken teeth. Jackson gives the old pug a jaunty humor and enough street smarts to suggest he got out of the game before his brain was disconnected from its moorings. He shuffles, wears rags and bags, but Erik sees gold: He sees one of those great, tragic sports pieces on the pain of a fallen hero, broken and bitter and raging at his fall from the ring to the alley, yet still buoyed by a certain knight's gentility.

The movie pretends this ancient trope has never been done before and it pretends that a cover story in the Sunday magazine of a Denver newspaper could turn a journeyman into a star in about three days and it also pretends that a professional newspaper copy desk could make an error so gigantic that it makes "Dewey Wins" seem like the Horoscope. And those aren't nuances.

The movie is at its best early on as Erik probes Bob's life and memories and the director, Rod Lurie, uses it as a platform from which to recall the golden age of fisticuffs in the early '50s, when the fights were big on the new thing called TV, Sylvester Stallone hadn't poisoned the name "Rocky," and others wore names like "Sugar Ray" and "Ezzard" and "Jersey Joe" and were, for a bit, almost like glamorous gladiators. Then, after chronicling Erik's sudden post-publication professional spurt, Lurie probes the weird chemistry of the writer-subject relationship, asking, "Who's using whom?" The movie tries to be sarcastic about the weird meld of entertainment and television journalism when the new star ends up as a ring announcer on national TV, even stooping so low as to offer a vulgar Teri Hatcher as a PR gal named "Flak"!

In the latter part of the film, nothing feels real, but what feels even more unreal is Hartnett. It's a cloying, sentimental, self-pitying performance propelled to the depths with tears at nearly every opportunity. A small thing that won't annoy you but annoys me: He can't grow sideburns so he combs some hair down and lets it hang to look like sideburns.

Lurie's career once looked promising with "Deterrence" and "The Contender," but now the less said about the episodes he directed of TV's "Commander in Chief" the better. The liveliest thing in the film is the great Jackson, slumming again in a role miles beneath him. Who can blame him for taking the money, but he ought to get into an "Othello" or even a "Hamlet" or a "Macbeth" before it's too late.

Resurrecting the Champ (111 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG-13 for some violence and brief profanity.