Josh Hartnett and Samuel L. Jackson in "Resurrecting the Champ"

Hollywood’s treatment of the prizefight game has long tended toward the sentimental. Boxing has often been portrayed as a moral melodrama involving heroics and character, as in that early-1930s handkerchief-soaker, The Champ (remade in 1978 by Franco Zefferelli with Angelina Jolie’s dad as the star). More infrequently it has turned its attention to the seamier, violent, even inhumane aspects of the sweet science.

Rod Lurie’s Resurrecting the Champ is very much in the old inspirational emo mode. It employs two staples of this tradition: a broken-down-and-out former contender and a loyally trusting, hero-worshipping little boy. It adds in another old movie figure: the frustrated, sharply ambitious news reporter. Despite Samuel L. Jackson’s scene-eating, audience-pandering turn as the title’s resurrected champion, Lurie’s movie is more concerned with its young journalist, a callow, careerist sports writer on a Denver paper. Erik Kernan (Josh Hartnett) is impatiently ambitious to become something more than a fill-in, utility guy for the sports department, but he’s not impressing his editor with his promise. His attention and heart don’t seem adequately engaged. His boss (Alan Alda) tells him his work is mechanical, “a lot of typing but not much writing.” (One of the movie’s two writers must have remembered Truman Capote’s famous crack to the same effect about Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.) Kernan chafes as he casts about for a big opportunity.

A chance meeting with Bob Satterfield (Jackson), long ago a third-ranked heavyweight challenger and now an alcoholic homeless man, gives him that opening. (Even then, it takes a day or two for this to dawn on our hero.) Seizing what he thinks is his ticket out of Palookaville, he writes a big piece for the newspaper’s magazine section on the old fighter’s life and decline. And like that, he’s a magnet for attention and job offers, and an even bigger idol to his adoring six-year-old son, to whom he’s been lying about his connections to prominent athletes.

At this juncture, Champ gins up its real theme, a father’s responsibilities to his son, including the need for straight shooting. There’s some handy, moral-laden parallelism between the life and mistakes of the old pugilist and those of the young reporter, who’s haunted by the memory of his own parent, a prominent boxing broadcaster and a less-than-sterling father.

The movie claims to be “based on a true story written by J.R. Moehringer,” but it doesn’t give off real-life vibes. It seems to owe more to Hollywood conventions than to anyone’s biography. It’s not that this material didn’t contain perfectly usable stuff. But Lurie and friends have so hedged their bets with schmaltz and shtick—particularly when it came to Jackson’s role and performance—that the movie sinks into a slick, moralistic, soap-opera mode.

It isn’t only the title character who has taken a shellacking—Champ slathers a thick, shiny varnish coat of sententiousness and sentiment over its narrative. Lurie yielded to sentiment in his previous feature, The Contender, a political drama released in 2000. In this one he scarcely resists the temptation.

There are also a couple of curious things: Scatterfield’s age and condition, for one. His brief glory days are supposed to have been over a half century ago and he must be over 70, but he’s allowed to bob and weave and land a couple of good ones on two guys who are barely a third his age.

And then there’s the matter of Hartnett’s “do,” a really odd retro hairstyling that calls to mind something a suburban high-school boy might have tried out in 1969. It’s almost as unconvincing as the old guy’s formidable fighting prowess.