Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Despondent over a painful estrangement from his daughter, trainer Frankie Dunn isn't prepared for boxer Maggie Fitzgerald to enter his life. But Maggie's determined to go pro and to convince Dunn and his cohort to help her.
Million Dollar Baby earns its reputation through exceptional performances (Eastwood, Swank, and Freeman all at career peaks) and a plot that subverts sports-movie conventions with devastating effect. The ending — a gut-punch euthanasia moral dilemma — elevates the film well above average. The cinematography is competent and atmospheric but not especially distinctive. Novelty is solid: the film takes a familiar boxing underdog structure and steers it somewhere genuinely unexpected, though it doesn't reinvent the genre wholesale.