The Pursuit of Happyness and Rocky Balboa

Will Smith plays the unluckiest man in the world in The Pursuit of Happyness.

But we soon find out he's amazing at solving Rubix cubes which is their way of telling us he's clever. So we're supposed to feel even more sorry for him, but you can’t help just thinking he’s carelessly wasted 30 years of his life.

He sells what look like sewing machines to hospitals and they're hard to sell because they're rubbish and expensive. Worse, we're forced to sit through scene after scene of Will running after somebody who's managed to nick one off him, with a voiceover saying something like "I call this part of my life 'running'".

The film doesn't know what its targets are and it fails to hit all of them. It fails at being a geriatric Good Will Hunting because the director and script aren't good enough. It fails at being a moving father-son bonding movie because it's unbearably sentimental. It's like they took all the forgivably bad bits from decent films -you know, the bit where the father holds the sleeping kid against his chest and stares into middle distance as the camera focuses on his single tear and the strings crescendo - taken ALL those bits and put them in one overlong boring film. Any genuine emotion is whitewashed by a saccharine musical score which drenches every scene with warm violins, occasionally punctuated by a Stevie Wonder song, cos hey, this is the 80s.

Will Smith does show signs of great promise as an actor, frustratingly so because he's stuck in this awful film. You get the feeling he's better than this, but desperately needs to break out and work with more exciting material and talent. He was on the right lines working with Michael Mann on Ali, showing glimmers of real potential but this is a major leap back and I just hope he gets it more right next time.

Make no mistake, this is a bad film. But worse, it's not even enjoyable trash - it's painful trash. It makes you work, it's frustrating, and frankly, there's far too much pursuit and not nearly enough happiness.


Rocky Balboa achieves a far better balance. The first hour of the film Sly said he'd never make is much as you'd expect. It's indulgent, constantly referencing the previous films and frankly it's pretty watchable.

Rocky's a washed-up has-been with a restaurant named after his dead wife whose loss he still hasn't come to terms with. But he's still Rocky and there's something inside him, something in the basement as he puts it, that he needs to get rid of. Rocky in his old age is even more mumbling bumbling than before and Stallone delivers his eccentric humour with perfect comic timing. Wandering around dejected in his hat and eyebrows, it's like watching Chaplin after one too many protein shakes.

Then comes the pay-off, when Rocky lets that beast out of his basement and hits the ring. Every effort's been made to make a ridiculous match fairly believable and the result is a tub-thumping, heart-pounding, foot-stomping corker of a fight that'd boil the blood of the most hardened cynic.

And in the end, there's closure - for Stallone, for Rocky and for his fans, real and fictional. Yes it's indulgent, much of it's been done better before, but was it worth it? I think so.