Good Luck Chuck, With A Movie Like This One, You're Gonna Need It

We've all heard of the movie Rocky, but do you know about the real-life boxer who helped inspire that famous film character? Despite the title leading you to think it was a film adaptation of a Zachary Levi NBC sitcom or perhaps a biopic of Chuck Berry, Chuck is all about the life and times of Chuck Wepner (portrayed here by Liev Schreiber), a boxer who got to fight Muhammad Ali (Pooch Hall) in a high profile fight that Wepner ended up losing. You might think that might have been shattering to Wepner, but he took the loss in stride and ended up becoming a minor celebrity due to him managing to briefly knock Ali off his feet during the fight.


Wepner gets to become even more notable when he learns that a little movie called Rocky has been inspired by his life and once that movie takes off, Wepner welcomes his newfound fame (though not fortune since he doesn't see any money from the motion picture) with open arms. This means because we're just a few years away from the 1980's, Chuck Wepner discovers cocaine and just becomes hooked on drugs and women. His wife (played by Elisabeth Moss) and his daughter don't want anything to do with him now and now Wepner's life is more broken than a boxer's nose. Will he be able to get back into the ring of life or is he doomed to be KO'd by the vices of luxurious living?

Chuck is such a paint-by-numbers movie that I'm shocked that copies of the film aren't accompanied by a handy paintbrush. If you've seen any boxing movie, you pretty much know what you're getting into here, whether it's in how the surprisingly few in number boxing sequences are filmed to the fact that Elisabeth Moss is basically playing that parody of a movie boxers wife from Saturday Night Live from earlier this month. Choosing to frame the real-life tale of Chuck Wepner through such rote narrative means the whole thing just ends up feeling so tired and so predictable, which is a pity because there are some really strong actors in the cast here.

Among those actors is Liev Schreiber, a guy whose burly and intimidating body makes him perfect to play a boxer from a physical perspective, though Schreiber's understated turn in Spotlight demonstrated that this guy is more than capable of turning in more subtle dramatic work than the typically one-note brawny antagonistic roles he typically gets to play. The lead role of Chuck aims to be a more thoughtful part for Schreiber to inhabit, but he never gets much to do and like the script leaning too heavily on rote take on boxing movie cliches, his performance hinges too hard on being derivative of past ne'er-do-well movie boxers and an accent that Schreiber just can't seem to get a handle on.

Ron Perlman is fun at least in his all too brief screentime as Chuck's coach and boy are it shocking that Ron Perlman has never played this specific role before, he feels like he'd be perfect for it. Naomi Watts, continuing her not so good 2017 (though I hear she's awesome in Twin Peaks) is probably giving the best performance in the entire cast, though her character is too poorly developed to make the abrupt turn into making her Chuck's eventual love interest feel organic at all. Similarly rushed are assorted pivotal emotional plot turns in the third act that just can't leave an impact because the movie is whizzing right through them. Chuck getting admonished for his neglectful behavior and also Chuck learning that his seemingly absent brother actually loves him occur in the same scene and it's all so awkwardly rushed. There's some interesting stuff in the life of Chuck Wepner for sure but boy does this movie adaptation of his life not rise to the challenge of adapting that life in an interesting way.