by Matt McKenna
The 2014 Academy Award nominees have yet to be announced, but it is a safe bet that Peter Segal's Grudge Match won't be taking home any hardware this year. And that shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has seen the film since it isn't very good. However, there are films that are bad by accident, and then there are films that are bad by design. Grudge Match is among the latter set. Why would a filmmaker go through the trouble of purposefully creating a movie they know will be universally panned by critics in addition to not making its money back? In the case of Grudge Match, it was utterly critical for the jokes to fall flat, the plot to be predictable, and the boxing sequences to languish in order for the film to express its critique of polarized partisan politics in the United States. Through both its content and its form, Grudge Match dissects the deleterious relationship between politics, the media, and a credulous population.
Grudge Match follows the time-tested Hollywood strategy of taking a genre film concept, casting the leads as older folks, and calling the whole thing a comedy (e.g. Space Cowboys, Last Vegas, Wild Hogs, etc). Specifically, Grudge Match belongs to the boxing film genre, the leads are played by 70-year-old Robert De Niro and 67-year-old Sylvester Stallone, and the film is littered with what appear to be jokes indicating the film is intended to be viewed as a comedy. Based solely on the description above, you can probably guess the film's plot: having grown old and pathetic, two retired rival boxers with convoluted, intertwined histories are lured into one last bout by a goofball promoter preying on each character's desperate need for pride and money.