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When it comes to sports on screen, you expect rich pickings from American writer-director Ron Shelton. He did after all deliver "Bull Durham", "White Men Can't Jump" and "Cobb" proving in all three that characters were as important to him as sport. As indeed they are in "Play It To The Bone" in which two has-been boxers (Antonio Banderas and Woody Harrelson), both with their own demons, are hired at the last minute as the warm-up act for a Mike Tyson fight. They are the last resort for a coarse boxing promoter (Tom Sizemore) whose fighters of choice are unable to appear: one is doped, the other dead. And the central thread, which is meant to supply the sparks, is whether you can ditch the compassion you feel for a close friend in order to thrash him in the ring. It is at the very least a different version of the buddy film.
However, this is also an example of the under-scripted genre, where the first giant chunk - on the road (they are, by the way, in a hurry, so why do they drive to Las Vegas?) - barely develops, and this is due in part to the two protagonists who are not nearly full enough. They are close to one another, and they are obsessed with the failures that took them out of the game. And that's it. Yet Banderas and Harrelson make a decent stab at limited material and at least have a chance to make the film less anaemic by letting blood flow in the ring. The fight scenes, incidentally, are crisp and lively. The only other signs of life are the scenes which depict boxing promoters as comically sleazy.
