Metacritic Film

Hammer, The

Starring Adam Carolla, Oswaldo Castillo, Jonathan Hernandez, Harold House Moore, and Heather Juergensen

MPAA RATING: R for brief language

Independent Film Circuit
Comedy
minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters March 21, 2008

Jerry Ferro's 40th birthday has brought his life into sharp relief, and it's not a pretty picture. A once-promising amateur boxer who quit so he wouldn't risk his perfect record of underachievement, Jerry has been knocking around from one construction job to another and spinning his wheels in an unsatisfying relationship, all the while with an eye toward eventually getting his shit together. His last connection to the fight game is the evening boxing class he teaches to middle-aged, middle-class, middle-management types at a gym in Pasadena, where he also works as a handyman. When venerable boxing coach Eddie Bell asks Jerry if he'd like to spar a couple of rounds with Malice Blake, an up-and-coming pro, Jerry reluctantly steps into the ring. Despite the butt-kicking Jerry otherwise receives, a one-punch knockdown of Blake convinces Jerry that it's time to make his return to competitive boxing. Thus ends a 20-year layoff and begins a hilarious fish-out-of-water quest for Olympic gold. (Independent Film Circuit)

WRITTEN BY
Adam Carolla (story)
Kevin Hench

DIRECTED BY
Charles Herman-Wurmfeld

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

57 / 100

Critic Reviews

75	TV Guide Maitland McDonagh It's genuinely funny, oddly romantic and surprisingly engaging for what could easily have been an obnoxious vanity project.
75	New York Daily News Joe Neumaier The Hammer benefits from Carolla's low-energy, low-impact style. He doesn't so much deliver quips as let them dribble out the side of his mouth.
75	San Francisco Chronicle Walter Addiego Nothing groundbreaking, but there's an easy charm in the movie.
70	Los Angeles Times Gene Seymour What you have here, essentially, is a classic "Honeymooners" episode juiced with tropes from the most recent "Rocky" movie.
63	New York Post Kyle Smith The script depends heavily on familiar stand-up comedy bits, but it's full of sharp wisecracks and slacker charm.
60	The New York Times Matt Zoller Seitz Rambling and disorganized. At the same time, though, The Hammer also has dry wit and unforced working-class swagger, and hits some surprising emotional notes.
60	Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern So many movies these days are overworked or overblown: The Hammer feels genuinely tossed-off. It isn't a great movie, or even a consistently good one. Yet it gets to elusive feelings about failure and success, hope and mortality (and reveals a quietly subversive attitude toward the boxing-movie genre).
60	Variety Ronnie Scheib This inordinately likable and consistently funny boxing saga-cum-romantic comedy doesn't so much ridicule the "Rocky"-type inspirational sports fable as gently deflate its heroic overdrive.
60	The Hollywood Reporter Stephen Farber The film hardly could be credited with breaking any new ground, but it has a hangdog charm, much like its leading actor.
50	Village Voice Aaron Hillis Former "Loveline" and "The Man Show" co-host Adam Carolla brings his self-deprecating, improvisational, regular-dude deadpan--as well as his former Golden Gloves status--to this semi-autobiographical comedy with ambitions so low that one might call it charmingly mediocre.
50	Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir If you liked "Rocky Balboa" you should be in good shape, since it's exactly the same movie, just aimed at a teeny-tiny-bit younger demographic and with an affectless leading man who avoids hambone acting by not acting at all.
25	Seattle Post-Intelligencer Bill White Plays like a pilot for a situation comedy about a 40-year-old carpenter who decides to return to the boxing ring.

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