Wanderings and … wonderings.

It’s obviously ravenous for Oscars, and it’s obviously a Ron Howard movie. And Renée Zellweger produces one of her worst shamelessly squeaky ‘performances’. Can this person act in anything? Rhetorical question alert. She’s an utter pain in everything, a desperate, squishy, attention-seeking pain.

Fortunately, Ms. Painweger doesn’t sink the movie, which is as formulaic as they come but not without merit. The boxing stuff is fabulous, not exactly Raging Bull (1980), but what could be? Only an 18 certificate and Martin Scorsese are capable of somehow transforming the brutality of the sport into impressionist art.

The Great Depression stuff is the main draw, and it’s fucking depressing. Economic meltdown. People turning on people. Ordinarily respectable folk resorting to crime. The themes are contentious: put everything into land or brick and mortar. Money is illusory. And no one knows anything.

Something like that.

What a slog this was! John Woo appears to have slept through the filming process as it’s so anonymous and so non-distinct in its framing and editing you’d never have guessed he directed it.

Highlight is the incongruous score that somehow featured in Scream 2 (1997).

The rest is balls.

This was excellent throughout, with Dennis Quaid doing his serious thing with aplomb, and the always interesting Stellan Skarsgård in a typically strong supporting turn. He even sparks up a doobie at one point.

Impressive.

This bafflingly brilliant movie is Anthony Hopkins at his apex, when he could pick any nonsensical script of his choice, revelling in his incarnation as the first ever middle-aged rocker thesp with a bashful edge.

Hopkins embodies every Walter Mitty’s conception of a bookish weirdo defeating the elements – our mild-mannered intellectual here casually surmounts a bird strike, a bear, a typically useless and insidious Alec Baldwin with a gun, and David Mamet’s inability to stop his juvenile faux-macho dialogue sourced from a thousand better scripts.

This film defines everyone in it.

What I liked most about this preposterous movie was how low-budget, small-scale and basically cruddy it came across despite the titanic cast. It’s like a made-for-TV thriller sketched off a napkin that was once owned by Clint Eastwood and tossed into a dustbin in Carmel-by-the-Sea.

This baffling, wholly ludicrous film somehow stars and is directed by Clint Eastwood.