Coming to theatres and VOD tomorrow, Friday, January 23: MANNY
Ryan Moore and Leon Gast’s profile of an unlikely boxing champion bowed at SXSW last year. Other screenings include Toronto’s Reel Asian and Little Rock.
First-time filmmaker Moore benefits from enlisting veteran helmer Gast, no stranger to boxing docs thanks to his Oscar-winning WHEN WE WERE KINGS, to tell the story of champion Manny Pacquiao, a Filipino man who used the sport to climb out of lifelong poverty and onto the world stage. His is a rags-to-riches, Cinderella story, appealing on the surface as archival footage and much too serious narration shows his string of victories, but becomes an inadvertent parody of celebrity as Pacquiao is shown trying earnestly to conquer the worlds of both music stardom and politics, all while still devoting the bulk of his time to the ring. Unfortunately the film doesn’t particularly seem interested in interrogating the intriguing cost or consequences of fame beyond brief suggestions of extramarital trysts or gambling problems, preferring instead to offer up a hagiographic portrait, complete with admiring comments from recognizable admirers like Mark Walhberg and Jeremy Piven. As a result, while Moore and Gast might succeed in introducing an appealing sports figure with a familiar, inspirational backstory to the uninitiated, there’s not much beyond that to make their portrait particularly memorable.
what (not) to doc 