1) Great acting.
2) A real guy movie. Now, I am a girl myself, but I really enjoy these kind of films. Maybe it's because I know that being a girl, I will never get to experience and have to go through some of the things men go through, for better or for worse. The Fast and the Furious, as much as I love that movie, is not a guy's film. This film is. Because, despite how much most men would want their life to be about outrageously fast cars and exotic women, it usually isn't (unless you are a Rolling Stone or Cristiano Ronaldo).
3) Christian Bale being his wonderful weird self again. Seriously, how many times has this man put his body through hell in order to deliver a performance? He lost about 30 kilograms to play his character in The Machinist. Then he went straight to working on Batman and buffed himself up to where he was 15 kg more than what he was before his diet for The Machinist. To make a long story short, it seems like there is nothing he won't do to make his character more believable and his performance more powerful. Here is a visual to prove it. In this film, he plays Dicky Eklund, a retired boxer - and current crack addict - known as a legend in his home town for going the distance against one of the best boxers of the time. Christian Bale once again lost a lot of weight to realistically portray a person struggling with a serious drug addiction, and his acting is great, where he manages to capture small nuances of the real Dicky's behavior and habits.
4) It's a true story worth being told. Before I go any further, i am not a big boxing expert, and I am not sure exactly how accurate this film is. But I did go on the savior of human kind, YouTube, and looked at some real fights of Micky Ward, and those seemed to be pretty spot on, so that's good news. Besides the accuracy issue, that I, unfortunately do not have much to say about, I did feel like I connected with the characters and believed that they could be real people. It's a great story to make a film about because it has all the ingredients: family, love story, drugs and jail, boxing.
5) The message this film sends. Despite the main theme of the film being boxing, and the film inside the film being about drugs, at the end of it, the story is about family. I thought the relationship with the two brothers and their mother was very well shown. In movies about the pursuit of greatness, I find that parents are always depicted as either extremely supportive or extremely unsympathetic. This film doesn't try to do that, which I really appreciate. Melissa Leo gives a wonderful performance as a mother of nine children, who tries her best at raising all of them equally, but inevitably struggles. She is by far not the perfect example of a mother, but neither is she a failure as one. That is what speaks to me as a viewer. Families are always tough to portray because the emotions that happen between people bonded by blood are often a challenge to show between actors that may know each other for a few weeks. It seems to me that the director David O. Russell and his team paid a lot of attention to this aspect of the film, and I think it really pays off.
you found the real reasons to see the movie
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