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Shadowboxer (2006) DVD Review
Shadowboxer (2006) DVD Credits:
Shadowboxer (2006) Directed by:
Lee Daniels
Shadowboxer (2006) Written by:
Will Rokos
Shadowboxer (2006) Cast:
Helen Mirren, Cuba Gooding Jr., Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Macy Gray, Stephen Dorff, Mo'Nique Imes-Jackson
Shadowboxer (2006) Released by:
Not available at this time
Region:
1
Shadowboxer (2006) DVD Release Date:
7th November 2006
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Shadowboxer (2006) Synopsis:

Silently dying from cancer, Rose, a contract killer, embarks on one final job with her partner and lover, Mikey. As she is about to kill Vickie, wife of an underground mob boss, Rose has a crisis of conscience and is compelled to save the life of this woman caught in a compromising situation. Now forced to hide out to avoid discovery from those seeking Vickie1s death, Rose, Mikey and their new family seek to find love and redemption under the most unexpected circumstances.

Shadowboxer (2006) DVD Review:

Cuba Gooding Jr. just doesn’t seem able to make a hit. He has bounced back from extreme adult roles to the children’s films which are only slightly more successful. Shadowboxer is no exception to this trend. While it is much better than some of the other films he has made recently and it features a great cast, there is a reason very few people will see it. For one reason it doesn’t seem able to decide what kind of film to be, with a stereotypical villain that kills mercilessly and heroes that are attempting to be far more complex, there is no balance. There are scenes of visceral enjoyment shoved in between character development which seems to drag far longer than it should.

Cuba Gooding Jr. is Mikey who is partner and lover to Rose (Helen Mirren), who has trained Mikey to be a professional assassin. They are hired to kill a woman by a disgustingly brutal crime boss played by Stephen Dorff, who has also had a difficult time getting a role in the public eye in the past years. The woman is pregnant and Rose suddenly can’t go through with the hit because she has had a new outlook because of her terminal cancer. Instead of killing her Rose takes the woman and the baby as her own and they begin a new life together. Rose struggles to make a family man out of Mikey even though he has the coldness of being a killer still deep within him, which doesn’t come easily at all.

There are a few good hit-man moments, but they’ve all been done better recently. A History of Violence alone makes it difficult to look at professional killing the same, but what Shadowboxer seems to take the most from is another film with a pregnant woman mixed up with gangsters; Way of the Gun. Even the thumping heavy bass in the soundtrack during moments of gunplay sounds like Way of the Gun and there is a quick Pulp Fiction moment when a gangster exits the bathroom with a magazine to find a gun pointing at him. There is nothing wrong with all of these familiar elements, after all Pulp Fiction is no more than a collection of things stolen from other films anyways, but other films have had much more fun with this material. Shadowboxer feels uncomfortably heavy through most of the film which makes it difficult to enjoy watching.

The DVD has a commentary track with Gooding Jr. and director Lee Daniels, which doesn’t have much silence once Gooding gets going. He talks a lot about his method and character while Daniels listens. At times they both discuss the characters in such detail that you feel as though there might have been more that you missed. There is also a making of featurette. `

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Shadowboxer (2006) DVD review written by: Ryan Izay

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