Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #470 in DVD
• Released on: 2009-06-01
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Format: PAL
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 105 minutes

Synopsis
Darren Aronofsky directs this searing drama about a past-his-prime wrestler who tries to regain his earlier fame. Mickey Rourke (ANGEL HEART, SIN CITY) continues a career revival of his own as the fighter, while Oscar winner Marisa Tomei (IN THE BEDROOM, MY COUSIN VINNY) and Evan Rachel Wood (THIRTEEN, DOWN IN THE VALLEY) co-star. Rourke is Randy 'The Ram' Robinson, a one-time superstar of professional wrestling who's down on his luck, estranged from his teenage daughter (Wood) and clinging onto the remains of his career by appearing in brutally violent bouts that barely pay him enough to make the rent on his trailer park home. It soon becomes clear that his broken body is incapable of following through the determination of his plucky spirit and when he succumbs to a heart attack he finds himself at a crossroads where he must decide whether or not to continue his futile pursuit of celebrity or make amends with those that he has alienated.

After his somewhat ambitious flirtation with the science fiction genre in THE FOUNTAIN, director Aronofsky returns to Earth and back to the emotional human drama of his earlier REQUIEM FOR A DREAM. Having fallen from grace in his own professional life, Rourke delivers a towering performance as Robinson; a man whose career trajectory is so close to the actor's own, the film is given a staggering level of poignancy.

Customer Reviews

Possible film of the year already!
`The Wrestler' stars Mickey Rourke as Randy "The Ram" Robinson, a superstar wrestler from the 80's who is now living in a trailer park, has numerous health problems, is working in a supermarket to make ends meet and does weekend wrestling gigs in school gyms to keep him still in the game.

Although we're only 26 days into 2009, I can't help but think that it is going to take something really incredible to top this as my film of the year already...it is brilliant! "The Ram" is a gentle giant (much like Stallone in Rocky) and this is his heartbreaking tale of what it is like once you step out of the spotlight and how he copes with holding onto the one thing that he truly loves in life - wrestling.

A very clever and moving part of the story that I liked in particular is Randy's friend Cassidy (Marisa Tomei) who is a lapdancer and is a bit older than most of other strippers in the club, as it is sort of a parallel to what Randy is experiencing in his life too.

I don't know if I enjoyed this more because I was a wrestling fan back in the "Golden Era" (the days of Hulk Hogan, The Ultimate Warrior and The Legion of Doom) so I can appreciate a lot of what is going on on the wrestling side of it, but then again my friends who have also seen it loved it too and they have never watched wrestling in their lives.

Overall this is one of the best films I've have seen in a long, long time and I highly recommend it to anybody. Any awards that this film wins this year are definitely well deserved.

The fighter still remains
Impressed by Mickey Rourke's Golden Globe winning speech, I decided to go see this movie.

Randy 'The Ram' Robinson fought the Ayatollah in Madison Square Garden back in the 80s, and still battles today. Ill met by fate, bruised and battered, his sinewy muscles scarred, his bones creaking in protest he still has the fight, and like a One Trick Pony he sticks to what he knows. It's a desperate life.

As you may recall in Raging Bull, Robert De Niro put on about 40 pounds to play fighter Jake La Motta as he got older, and he won an Oscar for his dedication to the role.

Mickey Rourke does something no less astounding here, putting on huge bulk to assume the persona and convincing physique of a professional wrestler. It's the most amazing acting performance of the year. The lines between actor and character blur and disappear. The kind of pain you see on Randy's face cannot be pretended. It can only be relived from the actor's parallel experience, which is what makes Rourke's performance so compelling.

For female companionship, he goes to a local bar, where a fetching stripper played by Marisa Tomei, Academy Award winner for My Cousin Vinny, gives him a lap dance for a fee. He can barely make rent, yet he has priorities.

Marisa gives an incredibly authentic performance, and it's a welcome surprise see her take it off in the name of art. I applaud her courage in doing so. Her physique is simply amazing, and her body art is very intriguing.

Evan Rachel Wood plays his estranged daughter. Previously, she played the female lead part in Across The Universe, and already has a quite impressive filmography under her belt. Here she sports a different look, and gives a perfect performance.

Some of the wrestling sequences are truly outrageous, and not a little disturbing. Having cut my finger on a ham slicer early in life, seeing people operating ham slicers gives me the heebie jeebies. If you have a problem with the sight of blood, I caution you that there are some disturbing sequences in the movie.

The Academy's actor awards tend to go to actors in two types of role:

1.Psychopath- No Country for Old Men, The Usual Suspects, There Will Be Blood, Training Day, Silence of the Lambs.

2.Mentally Disabled, Social or Physical Handicap, overcomes great adversity or discrimination- Shine, As Good as It Gets, A Beautiful Mind, Ray, Scent of a Woman, Capote, Philadelphia, The Pianist, A Beautiful Life.

Randy definitely has a handicap, and last year was the year of the psychopath, with both Daniel Day Lewis, and Javier Bardem winning Oscar.

I hope you find this review helpful, and, if you do, please click yes.

Exploitation at its best
A drama about a professional wrestler whose best days lie decades in his mostly miserable past, and who now struggles to make ends meet by appearing in minor wrestling bouts and working part-time in a grocery shop. His doctor warns him that he should give up wrestling otherwise it will kill him, and he attempts to come to terms with his failing life outside the ring by trying to reconcile with the daughter he abandoned in childhood and forming a relationship with a stripper he has a liking for. Amid these pathetic struggles he receives an unexpected offer of a high-profile rematch with his arch-nemesis from the 1980s , The Ayatollah, which could just be his ticket back to stardom and financial security.

It's difficult to separate the character of Randy "The Ram" Robinson from Mickey Rourke himself, which is one of the reasons why it's harder still to imagine anyone but Rourke making this film as good as it is, indeed it might not have been made without him. He's absolutely perfect for the part, although he had to do some pretty serious bulking-up in readiness. There are some parallels in this respect with the amazing lengths that De Niro went to for his Oscar-winning role as Jake la Motta in RAGING BULL (1981), the key difference being that De Niro was purely acting while Rourke could be re-living his own life. This is a film that centres around Rourke's character but his opposite number Marisa Tomei (a stripper called Cassidy) plays just as significant a role; like him she gets paid for putting her own flesh on display for a baying audience and her prescence here ensures that this is a film for adults of both genders - it would be a mistake to think of this as 'a man's kind of film'. So these two apparently very different people have something very much in common: they are exploited. This is an exploitation film with a difference, in that it's the characters being manipulated rather than the audience, as is normally the case with films of such a label.

A difference worth mentioning is that while Cassidy fully understands what she does for a living and has a very different personality off-stage, Randy is who he is at all times, this made all the more poignant for the fact that Mickey Rourke himself has lived the life of a down-and-out fighter in real life and in theory hardly needs to act at all.

While Rourke will always be the talking point, this film is made as very good as it is by a combination of other key factors - Marisa Tomei, the script, and the direction of Darren Aronofsky. Don't be surprised though if Rourke gets the call-up at the Academy Awards in a few weeks' time.