Cardboard Boxer Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.5
Overall		3.0

Cardboard Boxer Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman November 14, 2016

If you live in or near a major metropolitan area in the United States, chances are even a casual car trip that takes you near bustling intersections or freeway on and off ramps have taken you by destitute people holding (typically) cardboard signs asking for monetary assistance. Some of these signs are weirdly creative—just the other day I was driving past a major intersection in a suburb of Portland and a kind of scruffy looking guy was standing at the red light holding a sign that had been decorated with what looked like decoupage and which bore text in a variety of bright Sharpie colors (and, yes, the curmudgeon in me wondered where an unemployed and unkempt guy like this managed to acquire all of the stuff to make the sign). Homeless folks making cardboard signs (a little less “deluxe” than the one I described) are part and parcel of the grim Cardboard Boxer, a film which offers Thomas Haden Church (Sideways) as a destitute guy named Willie, exactly the sort of bedraggled, dirty guy most “normal” people try not to make eye contact with if they happen to walk by him on a downtown street. Cardboard Boxer’s greatest asset is in fact Church, who does some of his finest work since Sideways here (he also Executive Produced the film), but dramatically the film tends to bob and weave a bit too much, kind of like the fighter that Willie is encouraged to become by some nasty well to do youths who start setting up paid skirmishes between homeless men, filming them for their own amusement (and one assumes online notoriety).

The opening scenes of Cardboard Boxer document the sad, lonely life of Willie, who exists on what I assume is (one of?) Los Angeles’ Skid Row, a ghetto of “housing” units built out of old boxes or plastic tarps and defined by a number of obviously mentally unbalanced sorts, including one especially violent black man who keeps threatening to kill folks for stealing his skillet. In fact the desperate straits of these people are a recurring element, not just in threatening interchanges between themselves, but due to incursions from outside forces, including folks who show up on a rainy night to accost them and steal whatever they can from them. The irony of someone driving to this location to steal from these people is probably as good an example as any of the general lack of subtlety that Knate Lee’s screenplay indulges in at times.

Church’s kind of hulking athleticism might strike some as anachronistic in terms of trying to bring an obviously down on his luck guy to life, but in fact as personified by Church, Willie is kind of a “gentle giant” a la Of Mice and Men’s Lennie (who of course himself bears the ironic surname “Small”). Willie seems to be at least slightly developmentally disabled (again like Lennie), an inherently sweet man whose past isn’t really overly detailed (probably one of the film’s shortcomings), but who is in essence attempting to deal with the vagaries of fate that have been thrust upon him as best as he is able. He is seemingly non confrontational (as evidenced both by his demeanor out in the “wilds” of an urban environment with his sign, but also by his interaction with the “skillet” guy, at least initially), just trying to survive each day to the best of his ability. When he stumbles upon the remains of an old diary by a young girl (voiced by Elyse Cole), suddenly Willie has a “friend” of sorts, though he’s hobbled by his inability to read cursive (again, why this particular peculiarity, instead of just a "basic" illiteracy?).

An apparently former homeless guy nicknamed the Pope (Terrence Howard) now drives a cab and stops by what one assumes is his old stomping grounds to check up on folks (again, the film is curiously lacking detail in backgrounds of some of these characters), and offers Willie a blanket since the aforementioned thieves made off with his sleeping bag. Meanwhile, a group of yuppie youths, including the film’s supposed villain, J.J. (Rhys Wakefield), have shown up and offered any willing takers a wad of cash in order to fight each other. Willie turns out to be an unexpectedly “gifted” boxer and suddenly has enough money to clean himself up (if only for a day or so). Earlier, Willie has managed to buy himself flashcards which allow him to begin to decipher the cursive of the diary, and the film documents Willie's "letters" to the diary's author via some cloying if also admittedly touching voiceover. Already Cardboard Boxer is juggling too many elements for its own good, and the film never manages to really find the right balance between its more exploitative elements and what really should be its core message of perseverance and even potential salvation.

Yet another subplot documents Willie’s halting relationship with a bitter ex-vet named Pinky (Boyd Holbrook), a double amputee who is forced to pawn his Purple Heart at one point. Macy Gray also has a quasi-cameo as a hooker whose "room" is a nearby Porta-Potty (how romantic). The film is relentlessly dour in detailing these sad, dysfunctional lives, and then wants to make a near 180 degree turn into a grace filled coda where Willie finally feels the redemptive power of real human interaction and touch. It’s a noble sentiment, of course, but Cardboard Boxer gets to it in too wending a manner, undercutting the power of both the message and, ultimately, Church’s commendable disappearance into the character of Willie.

Cardboard Boxer Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Cardboard Boxer is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA (kind of an unusual property for the label, which often focuses on Asian films) with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.89:1. Once again the IMDb lists no technical data on the shoot, but the film's cinematographer Peter A. Holland was kind enough to let me know he shot the film with the Sony F55 at a native 4K resolution with Zeiss Super Speed MK III lenses, and the result, while a bit soft looking at times (something I assume is attributable to the vintage lenses), offers generally excellent levels of detail, at least in more brightly lit moments. The film has a kind of slightly desaturated, tamped down appearance that is gritty like its subject matter, and as such the palette never really "pops" in a traditional manner, though in the (relatively few) brightly lit daytime sequences, things look reasonably accurate within that slightly desaturated context (see screenshots 1, 5, 8, 9, 13 and 15 for some of these more brightly lit moments). That said, the bulk of the film plays out in fairly dark environments, often at night, and detail levels understandably are mitigated by the lack of light. What I assume is supposed to be a quick POV of the actual video being shot by the yuppie youths looks considerably more ragged than the bulk of the presentation (see screenshot 18).

Cardboard Boxer Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Cardboard Boxer's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 derives most of its surround activity courtesy of the outdoor ambient environmental noises, where the hustle and bustle of the urban environment features good use of the surround channels to sonically recreate the less than ideal living conditions of Willie and his cohorts. There's good spaciousness in these outdoor sequences, with nice attention to detail with regard to directionality and discrete channelization. The film's dialogue and voiceover are also rendered cleanly and clearly on this problem free track.

Cardboard Boxer Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 2:04)

As it typical with Well Go USA releases, the Trailer has been authored to automatically segue to the also included previews for other Well Go USA releases.

Cardboard Boxer Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Cardboard Boxer has a compelling core story, but the film could have used both some more focusing as well as more detail in terms of some of the characters' backgrounds. Church is quite effective in the lead role, but the screenplay is never quite able to deliver a knockout punch. Still, for those wanting to perhaps assuage their conscience for walking by homeless folks without offering any "spare change," Cardboard Boxer provides some moving moments. Technical merits are generally strong, and with caveats noted, Cardboard Boxer comes Recommended.