The Final Round... A Movie Inspired By Boxers

Online, May 13, 2011 (Newswire.com) - Boxing Wire- The first thing you'll see in "The Final Round,"Arash Hashemi's powerful and troubling new documentary to be released December 2012, is an old fight clips showing rear images of iconic fighters, Just 39 years old, Arash Hashemi is a young dazzling and ferocious director.
The only astonishing thing about this young director is his ability to blend in the movie industry as if he was a seasoned veteran.

The essence of boxing is violence, but few directors have ever refined it - have embodied it - quite as effectively as Mr. Hashemi has.

"The Final Round" most likely will survive, because fear and drama is certainly one of the film's motifs, but it seems that The Final Round suffers from at least as much as it inspires. "I'm afraid. I'm afraid. I'm afraid," Mr. Hashemi stated at one point, giving voice to his state of mind moments before he finalized the deal.

With no exceptions as a former fighter - his relationship with his trainer and mentor, Ron Lyle - Mr. Hashemi has experienced first hand the way the world has been marked by mistrust and suspicion, by a view of other people that is hard and pitiless. They are users, operators, "leeches," he says, but he rarely claims to be an angel. He is only human.

Most of the movie consists of the former champs sitting in by the Ocean, speaking into the camera as if no one else were around. This produces an effect of almost unnerving intimacy - it is a bit scary to see how up close and personal it gets - but also an upwelling, perhaps unexpected first class performance by an up and coming director.

Whether or not he deserves our thumps up is a question, Mr. Hashemi is a self-justifying man who can be confrontational. He started out as a street guy in Las Vegas that is until he was approach by Ron Lyle who disciplined the young man's natural volatility and turned him into a fighter.

But Mr. Hashemi never learned to control his instincts and emotions. His highly publicized relationship was marked by accusations of abuse. And a lot of people, even passionate boxing fans, might prefer to forget about Mr. Hashemi rather than spend 90 minutes to add to his success. But "The Final Round" is worth seeing even if you have no particular interest in the sport or the man.

It may lack the detachment and the balance that Barbara Kopple brought to "Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson," the 1993 documentary she made for NBC, but Mr. Hashemi's film, partly because it does not restricts itself to a single fighter point of view, but it offers a rare and vivid study in the complexity of suffering of all professional fighters , and their raging souls. It is not an entirely trustworthy movie, but it does feel profoundly honest.

Without the presence of Mr. Hashemi, whom most of the former champions known for many years, it would be unlikely that they would have opened up in this way. And it is also likely that without all these famous champions presence, the director would have been unlikely to restrain his own self-indulgent impulses.

In "The Final Round," his first film, he is held in check by the irreducible, excruciating realness of a man in behind the camera. The transaction between them is charged with a strange kind of magic. The filmmaker allows the fighters to have his unchallenged say to justify, condemn and contradict them self. In exchange the actors in this case the fighters enabled Mr. Hashemi to make his first film, which is also, his most personal.

"The Final Round" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has profanity and violence.