Boxing’s Best Biopics: ‘Bleed For This’ and the remarkable resurrection

As the film “The Featherweight,” about the life of boxing great Willie Pep, enters wide release, this week a different BoxingScene contributor will reflect on a boxing biopic that resonates with them. Today: "Bleed for This."

At a cinema in the West End of London in 2016, Vinny Pazienza – or Vinny Paz, as he was by then known – was the guest of honor at the British premiere of “Bleed For This,” the biopic that charted his scarcely believable comeback from a broken spine.

“I didn’t think it was going to turn out that good,” Paz told me back then. “It’s a fabulous movie. It’s 99 per cent on the money. In fact, they had to under-exaggerate things because my life is so crazy, you wouldn’t even believe it.”

Indeed, without the “based on true events” prefix, “Bleed For This” would seem so far-fetched, and so plainly ridiculous, that the scriptwriters would still be trying to escape from their straightjackets.

I mean, imagine trying to get that story over the line.

“OK, tell me again – he has what fitted to his head?”

“A halo, essentially a big metal cage.”

“Right, right. And how does that stay in place?”

“Screws.”

“Screws?”

“Yep. Four long ones that are drilled into his skull.”

“Right. And then what happens?”

“He starts weightlifting in secret.”

“In secret?”

“Yep. In his basement.”

“What, with a cage screwed to his head?”

“Big time.”

“Right. And then he has the cage unscrewed from his head?”

“Yep. While refusing to take a single painkiller.”

The movie begins with a naked woman watching a clingfilmed Paz working out on an exercise bike – as good a place to start as any – while he struggles to make the junior welterweight 140-pound limit ahead of his 1988 loss to Roger Mayweather. It then focuses on his alliance with Kevin Rooney (played by Aaron Eckhart) and the 1991 leap to junior middleweight, after which he beat Gilbert Dele to win the WBA title. (By the way, seemingly fading fast at 140 and then jumping up two weight classes to win a second world title is an impressive resurrection all on its own).

Those early plot lines give us a taster of Paz’s mischievous and always-loveable character, of which Miles Teller does a terrific job depicting. Facially, Teller and Paz are not hugely similar, but squint during certain scenes – particularly those in which sunglasses are worn – and it’s easy to make the leap. What Teller struggles with, however, is looking like a fighter. The stance is wrong, the way he holds his hands is wrong, the way his arms flail when he throws punches is wrong, and even the way his eyes swell is wrong. Teller is likely not helped by the fact he shares a ring with real boxers in every fight scene (Peter Quillin plays Roger Mayweather, Jean Pierre Augustin plays Gilbert Dele, and Edwin Rodriguez plays Roberto Duran).

He’s not the first actor to have those issues, of course, but when boxing is on screen, this film is at its weakest. Or at least it is for the likes of you and me. That’s the curse of being a boxing fan watching a boxing movie. Very simply, we know too much. That’s also why boxing fans are not generally the target audience for boxing movies. If we were, we’d also have an issue with the factual inaccuracies and misrepresentation of “true events.”

Unfortunately, but not unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of that here. We go straight from the Roger Mayweather fight to the Gilbert Dele fight as if mere months have passed, when, in reality, those two contests took place three years and seven fights apart. There’s no mention, for example, of Pazienza tuning up at 154 before he took on Dele. That is completely forgivable, however. Things on screen need to zip along at a good pace. The last thing we need is a cinematic reproduction of Paz outpointing Ron Amundsen.

Not so forgivable, however, is turning a podgy 43-year-old Roberto Duran, who hasn’t won a meaningful fight in years, into some kind of indestructible monster in the final scenes. Not only was Duran far from an indestructible monster when he took on Paz, he was certainly not Pazienza’s first comeback opponent. Worse is when Lou Duva, who is depicted throughout like a heartless mobster boss, proudly tells Paz the fight is for the “IBC world super middleweight title” and Paz reacts like he has just been inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. For us grizzled boxing fans, that’s when everything that was so very good and so wholesome about the previous 88 minutes is almost undone. Thankfully, everything before that is indeed so good and so wholesome that even the wisest of wiseasses should be able to get over it.

There are other inaccuracies dotted around, but it seems churlish – just too wiseass-ish – to list them all here. Because what this film is really about is not dates and times and titles but the lengths to which the human spirit can stretch. And what Paz achieved in those days, weeks and months after his car crash is heroic in the extreme.

“I never once considered giving up,” he said at the premiere. “I looked in the mirror, I cried quite a bit. I said, ‘What are you doing, Vinny Paz?’ The same second after, I said, ‘You’re gonna do this or you’re gonna die trying,’ and that’s how I felt.”

By some distance, the most terrifying character in “Bleed For This” is not Roger Mayweather or Gilbert Dele or Roberto Duran, or even Lou Duva, but that steel halo that Paz has screwed into his head following a car accident that left doctors uncertain if he would be able to walk again, let alone fight.

He chose the halo over any other treatment because it was the only option that offered any hope of returning to the ring, and the fitting and removal of it – not reenactments for the squeamish – look more like something from the “Saw” franchise than a biopic. Scenes of him banging the halo on a car door, weeping with despair and refusing a wheelchair as he shuffles to the house where his family will see this hellish contraption for the first time, are genuinely moving because we know, from photographs and home videos from the time, they must depict something very close to real-life events.

Very strictly told to not exercise, Paz then sets his alarm for 3:30 a.m. every day so he can do so without his family hearing. This road to recovery, and the impossible nature of it, is every bit as uplifting as Rocky training in the snow in “Rocky IV,” and the relationship between Paz and Rooney every bit as charming as Rocky and Mick. Eckhart, thanks in no small part to dutifully having a sizable chunk of his hairline hacked off, does a solid job of representing Rooney at a time in his life when alcoholism was threatening to take over. After six months, a fit and ready Paz then has the halo removed, refusing to take painkillers as they unscrew it from his skull.

“I was an idiot for doing that,” Paz later reflected. “If I knew what it was going to be like, I’d have been shot up with morphine. I had screws in my head for months and months, and then they had to take them out – it was a crazy moment.”

So crazy and downright wondrous is Paz’s recovery, in fact, that the film didn’t need to go any further than that. It didn’t need an IBC title, and it didn’t need Roberto Duran. Paz alone is more than inspiration enough.