Price of Glory: Critic Reviews

Not particularly well acted, it overstays its welcome and proves simultaneously predictable as a sports film and unconvincing as family drama.

Price of Glory is not a contender.

A by -the- numbers scenario that doesn't take its characters and fighters to that higher level.

Everything is spelled out with thudding obviousness until the film's one stab at originality - a Latino family at its center - is KO'd, too.

Among boxing movies, Raging Bull remains the all-time champ at breaking the mold. But Price of Glory fills it well.

What's peculiar is that the film doesn't build toward anything because even as the boxing careers flourish, the character of Arturo drags everything down.

Price of Glory wins a few rounds, but, unlike The Set Up, The Hurricane or Raging Bull, it loses the fight.

Price of Glory is an earnest but flatfooted saga.

Cliches fly faster than fists in Price of Glory, an old-fashioned boxing movie that can't really go the distance.

It's a film that avoids many of the genre cliches but, in so doing, loses the highs and lows that make us connect with these stories.

[Smits and Seda] give the movie more heart than was probably on the page, and their powerful presence nearly ennobles the cornball material.

The specificity of Glory's setting and the ethnicity of its characters enrich the story without moving it one iota away from a mainstream frame of reference.

Dances a fine line between PG-13 and R.

doesn't develop any of the characters

The road to glory is often paved with good intentions, but so is the path to mediocrity, which exactly where Carlos Avila's well-meaning drama heads in no time.

...generally entertaining, in a movie-of-the-week sort of way.

While the intentions are good, Price of Glory is never confident enough to push the boundaries of the sports drama mold.

It may know what it's supposed to do to succeed, but is too flat-footed, throws too many weak punches, and telegraphs most every move to the point that it will never have a chance of being seen as a champion.