This review contains spoilers, so if you plan to see this film, you might just want to move along...

I'd been wanting to see Cinderella Man for quite a while, as I'd heard it was one of the unheralded hits of last year. True to my liberal tendencies, I'm always tempted to root for the underdog.

Unlike many who really enjoyed it, I found it disappointing and unpleasant in a number of ways. But it had a number of good qualities too.

First, the good stuff: It's well-paced. It's well-acted. Howard does a good job of directing, Crowe, Zellweger, and many others give fine performances.

The story also contains a number of uplifting moral elements: The hero forces his son to return a stolen sausage -- even though the family is starving. Braddock, the protagonist, returns welfare money he receives from the government once he has enough to get by again. (I wish it worked that way in general!)

Braddock's wife, played by Renee Zellweger, hates his profession (boxing), worries that he will get hurt, but supports him nonetheless. And the hero has a strong desire to provide for his family, even at great (perhaps too great) personal expsense. (Sometimes, one wonders if the film version of Braddock is really acting in his family's best interest or out of pride.)

But there were a number of things I didn't like also.

One, is that the movie comes across as very realistic, and is about boxing. What I mean is this: boxing is a dreadful sport. I've never found much attractive in the image of two men striking each other repeatedly on the head and kidneys in attempt to cause short- and long-term damage. Perhaps I'm a bit of wimp, or perhaps I see it as a terrible waste, and an assault on something valuable that God created.

Cinderalla Man brings this reality home even further, with simulated X-ray-like views of bones breaking which caused even my physical-therapist girlfriend, who normally goes in for "The Surgery Channel", to cringe.

Another big theme was the depression. Howard's depiction seems to be telling us that if we all just unionized, we all would have been richer and better-fed. (I imagine a group of castaways on an island who don't have enough to eat, and one proposes that if they just unionized, they'd suddenly be better fed. The problem was that we didn't have an economy to speak of -- thanks to the near-criminal political policies of Hoover and (even more so) FDR. Unionizing wouldn't have fixed that.)

But by far the worst aspect of the film was Howard's shameful misrepresentation of Max Baer, who Howard casts as the bad guy.

Research we did after the film (for once, my girlfriend started it) showed Howard's depiction to be far, far from the truth. For one, the film depicts Baer at the peak of his health, while Braddock, we are to believe, is the underdog because he has a broken rib.

But the truth is that Baer went into that prize fight with a broken hand! Howard never mentions this, of course, lest we have sympathy for Baer, as we did previously for Braddock, under the same circumstances.

Howard depicts Baer's people as attempting to dissuade Braddock from fighting Baer, lest Baer kill him in the ring. In truth, Braddock was recruited by Baer's people.

I can find no evidence of any altercation between the two outside the ring, much less one where Baer behaves like a pig.

In the ring, Baer is depicted as being a bad sport, a would-be killer who violates the rules many times with punches and kicks to the crotch. In reality, Baer was a joker in the ring, who didn't take the fight seriously enough, and even pretended, for obvious comic effect, to be be knocked out once. Apparently Baer went a bit too lightly on Braddock at points (as he seemed to with many, apparently out of fear of hurting them seriously). Other than trash talk about Braddock's wife in the ring (that part was true, apparently) he behaved with good sportmanlike conduct.

Baer is depicted as a cold-blooded killer. In truth, when one of his opponents died in the ring, Baer had nightmares about for the rest of his life, considered dropping out of boxing forever, retired for a full year, and even -- get this -- put the man's children through college out of remorse for what had happened. And Baer was not the only boxer mentioned in the film who had a reputation as a killer: turns out that a number of other boxers did too.

Bear was, in fact, a nice guy. Think Jethro Bodean from the Beverly Hillbillies. In fact, think very seriously about Jethro Bodean: because in real life, he was Max Baer, Jr., Max Baer's son.

And that's the problem here: We understand that elements of films can be fictionalized or exaggerated for effect. But the problem here is that we're dealing with a real person, with real living relatives, a person who was a principled guy, a nice guy who had a conscience, who was himself a bit of an underdog, but who is misrepresented in a popular film as a villain.

But I guess that's about par for the course these days for Ron Howard, considering some of his recent films.