Metacritic Film

Price of Glory

Starring Jimmy Smits, Jon Seda, and Clifton Gonzalez Gonzalez

MPAA RATING: PG-13 for violence, language and brief drug content

New Line Cinema
Drama
118 minutes | Color
USA
Released In Theaters March 31, 2000

Arturo Ortega (Smits), a former boxing champion, focuses all his attention on the single-minded pursuit of training his three sons to follow in his footsteps, coming close to tearing his family apart in the process.

WRITTEN BY
Phil Berger

DIRECTED BY
Carlos Avila

Overall Metascore

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

32 / 100

Critic Reviews

85 Mr. Showbiz Other (Specify)
Complaints? None, except perhaps a wish for more length, and a little more depth.
75 Philadelphia Inquirer
Hollywood keeps turning out boxing movies. Price of Glory is the latest to step into the ring and face an increasingly no-win situation
75 Entertainment Weekly
The movie, while heartfelt and vividly shot, takes too many rote genre turns.
75 San Francisco Examiner
A movie that features rich Mexican American characters and an uncompromising story line is always timely.
75 Portland Oregonian
Price of Glory won't make anyone forget "Raging Bull" or "Rocky."
63 New York Daily News
Fathers and sons with problems expressing their feelings makes for a story that is universal, and that has also been done to death. Thankfully, the boxing scenes are extensive and pack the appropriate punch.
58 Seattle Post-Intelligencer
When the film suddenly turns into "Rocky" -- as all boxing films of the past two decades invariably do -- it invalidates its theme.
50 New York Post
Price of Glory isn't an embarrassment on the order of the last major boxing movie, "Play It to the Bone," but it's not especially worth intercepting on its way to the video racks.
50 TV Guide
Despite excellent performances all around, the actors can't overcome the script's limitations.
50 Chicago Sun-Times
Made me feel like I was sitting in McDonald's watching some guy shout at his kids. Price of Glory gives us two hours of that behavior, and it's a miscalculation so basic that it makes the movie painful when it wants, I guess, to be touching.
50 Miami Herald
Moves too slowly, running out of gas in the later rounds of the plot.
50 San Francisco Chronicle
A boxing movie that exists in that gray area between prototypical and typical, the quintessential and run-of-the-mill.
50 Chicago Tribune
A pretty good film, acted powerfully .
40 Los Angeles Times Eric Harrison
The specificity of Glory's setting and the ethnicity of its characters enrich the story without moving it one iota away from a mainstream frame of reference.
38 Boston Globe
Stumbles over its own clumsiness until it goes down for the count.
30 Film.com
It's not easy to go 12 rounds against a cliche-ridden story like Price of Glory and remain standing. But somehow stars Jimmy Smits and Jon Seda, and first-time director Carlos Avila, manage to survive.
20 Variety
May hold some appeal for Latino auds in the Southwest but will fold after a couple of rounds in the big arena.
20 Film.com
Not a very good movie; it's sentimental, pandering and psychologically anorexic.
20 Washington Post
Smits can't wrench free of this tangle of cliches.
20 Dallas Observer M. V. Moorhead
Predictable and conventional and unadventurous. It can't really be defended, except that it's comfortably enjoyable.
20 Austin Chronicle
The film is a TKO before it even had a chance to get off a decent hook.
20 Chicago Reader
The labored storytelling in this movie about displaced ambition diminishes the impact of the powerful performances.
20 The New York Times
In films, as in the ring, heart and will without exceptional talent don't produce winners.
10 LA Weekly
It's outclassed by the memory of just about every prizefighting flick you've ever seen.
10 Village Voice
Contrived and contrived sloppily, this self-adoring soap even manages to make its all-Hispanic cast seem unconvincing -- except for Seda.

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