It succeeds in many of the ways a sports movie should, and, by employing a slightly different viewpoint for most of the production, manages a sense of freshness.

I'm far from being a fan of the sport, but the boxing sequences held me and the overall atmosphere appears reasonably authentic.

Think of Against the Ropes as a "Rocky" story -- if, that is, the vintage is somewhere between "Rocky IV" and "V," and the action centered around the Burgess Meredith character as played by Meg Ryan wearing "Barbarella" outfits.

Ryan and the rest of the cast are forced to slug it out with the kind of trite dialogue that seems to have been lifted straight off of those corporate inspirational posters.

Right up to the ludicrous finale and an even more improbable denouement, everything rings Hollywood-false. More galling still, the filmmakers' inventions take the zing out of the facts.