Movie Reviews : ‘Split Decisions’ Packs a Pretty Strong Punch

“Split Decisions” (citywide) is a rousing boxing melodrama that pretty much earns a split decision itself. It’s about an East Side New York family, battling against the mob that killed one of its sons, and the design of the plot is kitschy and obvious.

We get the dedicated son and his black sheep brother, Craig Sheffer and Jeff Fahey as Eddie and Ray McGuinn, and Gene Hackman as Ray’s loving, unforgiving dad, a trainer who hates the mob elements that control Ray’s career. There’s a fixed fight, a murder and a couple of brutal villains, James Tolkan’s smug enforcer Benny and Eddie Velez’s sadistic boxer, Snake. At the end, one of the McGuinn boys battles it out, with his dad and granddad in his corner, against his brother’s killer, the seemingly impregnable Snake, with crime kingpins sneering at them from ringside.

“Split Decisions” reeks with contrivance. And perhaps what goes wrong with the movie are the elements that made it salable: Big, flashy crude strokes of coincidence and archetypal fable, the hallmarks of the post-”Rocky” boxing movie.

But there are other elements here, too, the steam and sting of some of writer David Fallon’s dialogue; the top-to-bottom excellence of the cast and the crackling ensemble quality director David Drury gets. Drury (“Defense of the Realm”) is a British director, once a David Puttnam protege, but he’s also an ex-amateur boxer. He seems to take a real delight here in the burn and grit of this low-life Manhattan East Side atmosphere.

There’s a taut, springy, nervous rhythm to the best parts of “Split Decisions,” the family encounters and arguments, the confrontations with the villains. They’re not especially new; writers like Paddy Chayefsky and Budd Schulberg did them better decades ago. But the actors give them a spontaneity and edge that recalls the Warner Bros.’ ‘30s melodramas. Those films were often kitschy and obvious and had phony, pump-’em-up endings, too. But the casts carried you through them; that’s often what happens here.

“Split Decisions” also brings back that old staple of the boxing genre--attacks on the corrupt mechanics and politics of the sport (“Body and Soul” “Champion,” “The Set Up”), everything that was lost after Stallone’s “Rocky” started viewing boxing not as it was, but as we liked to imagine it while watching TV.

It’s not free of that phony-inspirational, pseudo-Capra beer commercial style. And the last half, despite a well-staged fight (by Paul Stader), seems over-edited or underthought, unwinding with the clipped certainty of the typical low-genre, high-concept special. What you remember with pleasure are the actors, Hackman’s simmering, hair-trigger integrity, Sheffer’s clean-limbed idealism, John McLiam’s soft, shambling generosity as the granddad, Velez’s showy sadism, even Jennifer Beals’ steet-smart glitter. Two especially stand out: Fahey (the creep in “Psycho III”) who gets a really pathetic, self-destructive quality into Ray and Carmine Caridi, perfect as a benevolently corrupt bear of a manager.

You always expect Hackman to be this good but not necessarily everyone around him. Nor do you expect a whole cast to play off each other with this kind of snap, bite and tension. Sometimes cliches can work well if they’re infused with a little energy and style. That’s what “Split Decisions” (MPAA-rated R, for language and violence) offers. At the end, despite being bloodied by all those post-”Rocky” below-the-belt kitsch hits, the movie is still standing, still swinging.