Review: Strength and Honour

Michael Madsen plays an Irish-American boxer who is asked by his wife on her deathbed to put away the gloves after a fatal sparring session with his brother-in-law. He soon learns that his young son is afflicted with the same heart illness that killed his mother. Grief-stricken and looking for atonement, Madsen moves to Cork, Ireland and in order to finance the very expensive operation for his son, tries to get into a bare-knuckle fighting tournament financed by a local community of gypsies (or ‘travellers’). The chief antagonist is a rowdy, sadistic fighter known as ‘Smasher’ (Vinnie Jones), whilst Patrick Bergin is a ‘traveller’ elder, and Richard Chamberlain is Madsen’s Irish boxing trainer. Perhaps happy that he wasn’t torturing people for a change,

Michael Madsen apparently considers this the best work he’s ever done. Aside from that and a couple of minor film festival awards, this has a horrible Rotten Tomatoes rating, with the late Roger Ebert’s 2 ½ stars about the best reception the film has gotten. So what did I make of this 2007 flick from writer-director Mark Mahon? I rolled my eyes so often throughout that I feared they’d recede into the back of my head and never set straight again.

5 minutes in and I knew this one was gonna be a bit ‘special’: Michael Madsen accidentally kills his brother-in-law sparring in the ring. So he goes to atone for it in Ireland riding a bicycle and hanging out with gypsies or some shit before paying for his son’s expensive operation by entering a bare-knuckle fighting tournament. Yeah, this sounds like a prize film right here. A boxer with guilt, bad Irish accents, a kid with a dodgy heart, and Richard Freakin’ Chamberlain doing Burgess Meredith from “Rocky”. No wonder this movie has been buried, there’s not a cliché it doesn’t offer up. Madsen even wears a yellow and green boxing robe with a frigging shamrock on it! Give me a break. Awful stuff, and something tells me Madsen just loved the opportunity to down a lot of Guinness.

It’s not until Patrick Bergin and his band of ‘travellers’ turns up that we finally get some convincing Irish accents, but his brood seem to have wandered in from a completely different film than the clichéd redemption story Madsen’s enacting, let alone Vinnie Jones’ Clubber Lang act as the chief antagonist (Jones’ accent sounds Geordie for the most part, somewhat extra-terrestrial the rest of the time). Meanwhile, how do such a seemingly working class community manage to organise a fighting tournament with such a big cash prize? If they had all that much cash, why the fuck is everyone living in a bloody caravan? The whole thing is jarring and askew, though at least the film Jones seems to think he’s in, is somewhat entertaining in a completely overblown kind of way. Jones’ mean mug beating the snot out of everyone is generally a watchable thing, even if I’ve seen the Viet Cong portrayed on screen with more nuance. At any rate, he’s the only thing you’ll remember here. As for Madsen, he plays the down and out aspect to his character perfectly, but at no point is he a credible physical match for Jones, and his Irish accent for the first few scenes is completely absent. I think that’s because he’s meant to be an American, but when he’s in Ireland, all of a sudden he’s putting on a bad Irish accent. Why, if he’s not even Irish? Weird. Even the fighting scenes are dull and monotonous here, the final nail in the coffin.

This boxing/redemption drama is all over the shop, much like the supposedly Irish accents supplied by Michael Madsen and Vinnie Jones. Terrible, abysmally clichéd debut by writer-director Mahon. It never begins to work, though at least Jones is lively as the chief antagonist. I’m not surprised that Mahon (who serves as producer/writer/director) hasn’t come out with anything in the years since this debut, basically a lame Irish boxing version of “Over the Top”.

Rating: D+