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Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

I think this movie really missed it's target audience. While it is breath of foul mouthed air in the usually formulaic and insipid gymnastic movie genre, it goes too far with the raunch. I think if they had pared back the language and nudity to a PG-13 level and replaced it with more character development and heart, they could've been competing for the Gold. Okay, enough of the gymnastic metaphors. Some of this stuff was staring them in face. I mean, they create a central character who's totally self-centered, lacking in schooling and social skills. They could've given her a great scene and a large amount of redemption by revealing her Olympic training robbed her of childhood. She didn't get proper schooling, only had rivals, never friends, never learned how to relate to other people and because of her early victory, was never was allowed to grow up. It was right in front of them but they never go there. As a result Hope lacks depth and the movie doesn't really deliver a satisfying ending. Given that most gymnastic movies target girls who are of age to be learning gymnastics, the language goes too far and the sex scene while being sort of funny is way too graphic for a family with children to watch. They could've accomplished the same goals the movie strives for with a little less of the language and sex and a little more heart. Still, it's a good movie and a fun watch, it's just it could've been very good.

In some ways, "The Bronze" is so entertaining because Melissa Rauch is playing someone in diametric opposition to her mousy character on "The Big Bang Theory". Hope Gregory is the sort of Olympics washout that's fun to laugh at; a foul-mouthed brat who trades in her local celebrity for free stuff at the mall. Rauch really plays the Midwestern accent to the hilt, and it pairs very nicely with the coarse dialogue.Somewhere in all of this is a sports movie, but that's not where it excels. This character ends up right back where she started, and it works great as an exaggerated portrait of a has-been in a no-name town. This flew completely under my radar, and I was surprised (happily) by how enjoyable it was.She's very funny.7/10

Contrary to the negativity of the title of my review, I found The Bronze to be both moving at times, and at other times funny. Not hilarious, but just funny in a surreal, this could never actually happen way. I give it 9 out of 10 at a time when interesting characters are just AWOL from the big screen.Not so with Hope. She is genuinely interesting in a kind of "hate her but can't stop thinking about her" way.The theme of this film has been done before many times. I prefer to liken it to The Wrestler than Blades of Glory. The film is definitely satirical, but not comic satire. It is much too gritty. Particularly for anyone who lives in small town Ohio (or any part of the country today) looking at the ghosts of their one-time dreams on the wall. Unlike a film like The Natural, where the washed up "wunderkind" comes riding in with a halo over his head to bail out the home town underdogs, in this film Hope rides in via the plush leather bucket seats of a "vintage" Buick, and clearly she has horns instead of a halo. That villainous exterior is what essentially makes her character so interesting.The problem is that in an attempt to sell this film to millennials, it has to transport this interesting, complex character to an episode of Family Guy, piling raunchy joke on top of raunchy joke. And as a result, for all it's brilliance, this is not the kind of R rated film you can every sit down and watch with even your teenage children. The sex scene is funny, but far to graphic (and needlessly). As are the many gratuitous sexual reference throughout the film and the non-nonchalant glorification of drugs.For a family comedy about a female protagonist trying desperately to hang on to some existential validation through past victory, and behaving badly in the process, I would recommend Butter. For a film you want to watch late at night when the kids are asleep, for the experience of periodically picking your jaw up off the ground, The Bronze delivers.

Really nice surprise this turned out to be, I had seen the trailer and thought it seemed like good mindless fun the rating was a bit low (currently at 5.9) so I wasn't too sure just how good it would be.But I must say that it exceeded my expectation, and what I thought would be some mindless fun actually turned out to have plenty of substance to go along with the gags.The lead-character is played by Melissa Rauch, someone who I never had heard of prior to this but she plays the role perfectly with a lot of attitude and even though she is pretty self-centred somehow she still manages to make her character likable.I was surprised to see that she actually wrote the script herself (together with her husband) so that's even more impressive.The plot albeit familiar manages to feel really refreshing and does well at not landing itself in cliché-land, which is more than one can say about most sports-movies.But then this is more than just a sports-movie.Really good performances from the rest of the cast as well, notably Gary Cole and Thomas Middleditch. And some really nice cinematography as well, especially the gymnastic-scenes.Oh and the soundtrack fits perfect for the movie as well.So yeah definitely worth a watch, if you don't mind f-bombs and adult humour of which there is plentiful here.