A boxer who could unleash flurries of devastating punches, Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini more than earned his nickname. But as this sports doc reminds us, he wasn’t the family’s first “Boom Boom”—that’d be his dad, Lenny, a promising pugilist whose career was cut short. Filmmaker Jesse James Miller not only puts Ray’s “I did it all for my pops” motivations front and center, he also reverse-engineers a meeting between the former WBA lightweight champion and the son of Kim Duk-koo, the fighter who died after a title bout with Mancini. Filtering this superstar’s bio through a dual portrait of paternal compensation is an interesting way to recount a well-known tale—which only makes Miller’s uses of padded-out interviews, a saxophone-Muzak score and cheesy shots of Mancini staring pensively into the distance that much more deal-breaking. It’s not a shame about Ray. You can’t say the same for The Good Son.
Follow David Fear on Twitter: @davidlfear