Both the beauty and her beastly pursuer remain too blankly generic for the implications of the movie's main metaphor to come through vividly.

'Boxing Helena'' is a bad film - with terrible acting, cliched dialogue, a silly script, pedestrian camera work and inferior direction.

It's probably just as well that last-minute dropouts Kim Basinger or Madonna didn't take the title role, as the presence of a star lurking powerlessly on the little platform no doubt would have been distracting and more laughable than it [is] now.

More sleepy than sensational, Jennifer Lynch's feature directorial debut was unfairly decried as misogynistic torture porn, which is bizarre considering it's so obviously framed as a sick fantasy from the POV of its disturbed male protagonist