'Champ' Packs a Weak Punch

The newsroom-meets-boxing-ring drama "Resurrecting the Champ" is slow on its feet, critics say, weighed down by its own sentimentality, despite a powerful performance by Samuel L. Jackson—"slumming again in a role miles beneath him," writes Stephen Hunter of the Washington Post—and a taste of the nuts and bolts of journalism. 

The film about a struggling sportswriter who discovers a homeless former champ is "soft around the middle," says Variety's John Anderson, undermined by what Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly calls "speechy monologues on the responsibilities of journalism and the gooey sanctity of the bond between fathers and sons." While critics agree that Jackson is a knockout as the ravaged champ, the film itself is a swing and a miss. (More Resurrecting the Champ stories.)