Ron Shelton is a writer/director with a specialty -- he does sports movies. He's done baseball (Bull Durham, Cobb), basketball (White Men Can't Jump, Blue Chips), football (The Best of Times) even golf (Tin Cup). He tried to do boxing back in 1996, but studio wrangling forced him to pass on directing his script of The Great White Hype. That's too bad, because his second swipe at the Sweet Science, Play it to the Bone, is far from a knock out. Hell, it's not even a glancing blow.

Woody Harrelson and Antonio Banderas play two has-been middleweights and best of friends and who suddenly get a second shot at the limelight when freakish circumstances land them on the undercard of Mike Tyson's latest pay-per-view 93 second butt-whuppin'. The morning of the fight, the pair find out that they'll get to fight each other with the winner earning a title shot. All they have to do is make it from L.A. to Vegas in time for the bell.

The duo hops in a car with Banderas's current flame (Lolita Davidovich) -- who once dated Harrelson -- and together the three hit the road. The set-up has all the makings of a classic road movie with a central conflict: Will they make it to Vegas on time? It turns out the answer is yes -- there is no conflict; they encounter few problems along the way. Instead, we're stuck in the car with these people, listening to them yap as they bicker over their shared histories. The sizzling Lucy Liu joins the ride for a brief time, and manages to make things interesting -- but the script sends her packing too quickly.

Once they finally reach Vegas -- it's all anti-climax. The fight is dull, the outcome -- extremely predictable. To make matters worse, the sequence is filmed in shaky close-ups with lots of quick cutting. The technique is meant to convey the frenzy of the ring, but it fails -- and it doesn't help the viewer figure out what's going on. As the boxers begin to hallucinate from all the pummeling, the sequence devolves into some truly bizarre fantasy images featuring (I can't believe I'm complaining about this) strangely gratuitous nudity.

The movie's biggest problem, though is probably its sheer lack of laughs. Shelton managed to wring a lot of comedy from the sport in the aforementioned The Great White Hype. Maybe he put all his good boxing jokes in that movie -- because they ain't in this one.

(c) Copyright 2000