‘Bleed for This’ keeps punching

By Jake Coyle

AP Film Writer

Director Ben Younger’s “Bleed for This,” starring Miles Teller, distinguishes itself from all the other boxing movies by doubling down on some of the tried-and-true formulas. It’s a comeback times two.

Teller plays Vinny Pazienza (“Paz” or “the Pazmanian Devil”), a lightweight and middleweight champ from blue-collar Providence, R.I. He isn’t exceptionally powerful or technical, but he thrives on pain. In the ring, he doesn’t seem to get fired up until he’s been hit a little. “You got heart, kid,” one character tells him, “but you wear it on your chin.”

Vinny’s boxing career is on the ropes, and after a bad loss, he’s left pleading his promoters for just another fight. When a knockout lands him in the hospital, he tells the doctor: “The pain doesn’t bother me.”

This, it turns out, is tempting fate. Thanks to a rejuvenating new trainer, Kevin Rooney (Aaron Eckhart), Vinny’s career finally takes an upswing. But this is quickly wiped out, on a run to Foxwoods, by a car crash that nearly breaks his spine. In the wreckage, Vinny’s bloody unconscious head rests gently on a shattered window as if it were a pillow.

He’s fitted with a “halo,” a metal contraption that surrounds his head to keep his neck straight. Told he might not walk again, let alone fight, Vinny resolutely embarks on an almost quixotic comeback.

The film’s finest scenes are of Vinny, a man built to hit things, wired with steel so that he can’t touch anything let alone jab it. One less-than-enthusiastic girlfriend, who gets her hair caught in it, is replaced by a more accommodating brunette: “It’s like braces times a thousand,” she says, enthusiastically. Vinny’s sister, across the kitchen table, deadpans to Vinny: “She might be the one.”

Most of the film’s big moments, even its triumphant fight scenes, are sufficient if uninspired. At this point, the boxing movies are even stepping over each in the ring; one major fight here is with Roberto Duran, the subject of “Hands of Stone.”

“Bleed for This” is ultimately a straightforward, well-acted parable about taking punches. Maybe that’s why boxing movies are everywhere these days: People, feeling beat-up, want the inspiration. Or maybe if the standard boxing tropes keep swinging, they just want to duck.