Review by Charles Cassady Jr.
I don't like RAGING BULL.Okay, April Fool! You been punked!... Hello? Are you okay? (checks reader pulse, shakes head grimly, pulls sheet over blog follower's corpse)... Dead of a heart attack induced by shock. Gee, I didn't mean to do that. Drops our readership considerably. In my mild defense, I wasn't half kidding. True, Martin Scorsese's RAGING BULL, right from its 1980s release, was embraced by critics better paid than I (which is all of them) as a classic, canonical, the best thing that ever could be, making plenty of Top Ten lists. Still, might I politely state that from my perspective it's just a tiny bit...overrated?
As every schoolboy knows, the feature is the biopic of boxing champion Jake LaMotta (Robert De Niro), middleweight title-holder from 1949 to 1951. He's depicted as a ferocious brawler who had a distinction of never getting knocked out in the ring. LaMotta is here a force of primal fury, a thug more so than an athlete. He discards his first wife to take as his teen bride a stereotypically 1940s-50s blonde right off a pulp-novel cover (Cathy Moriarty in a breakthrough role). His fast-talking, deal-making little brother Paulie (Joe Pesci in a breakthrough role), Jake's manager, may be the one guy looking out for Jake's welfare (if only to feather his own nest), but Joey's schemes nonetheless get Jake involved in a mobbed-up scandal in which the vicious battler must unwillingly `throw' a fight.
