The fight of their lives

Boxing movies have one advantage over action films with high body counts and world-shattering explosions: It's not written that the hero has to blast all the bad guys into oblivion and finish the third act in professional triumph. In fact, some of the best-remembered movie boxers never won their big fights, from Marlon Brando's Terry Malloy -- the patron saint of washed-up pugs everywhere -- to Sylvester Stallone's Rocky Balboa, who went down in glorious defeat in his big comeback bout. (Robert De Niro's Jake La Motta in "Raging Bull" may have had his 15 minutes in the ring, but his was hardly a zero-to-hero story.)

In filming "Unchain," his new documentary about four young boxers in Osaka, Toshiaki Toyoda took the open-ended structure of the boxing movie to another level. When he started filming in 1995, he had no idea whether one or more of his subjects would become a Jake La Motta or even Rocky Balboa -- or trundle down the slope to oblivion. As it turned out, none of them made it big. (One, whose ring name Unchain Kaji supplied the title of the film, never won a bout, period.)

Toyoda did not, however, simply record whatever fate (or his heroes' opponents) dished up. Though not stated in the film's promotional materials, Toyoda fiddled with chronology and even staged several scenes, though not in a blatantly obvious way. It might, thus, be more accurate to call "Unchain" a docu-drama -- not that it matters.