An inspired-by-true-events story about Reno, Nevada’s first legalized brothel that’s both dry and flaccid, Love Ranch is set in the titular den of iniquity but misguidedly focuses on a washed-up Argentinean pugilist named Bruza (Sergio Peris-Mencheta) who falls in love with his new manager, Ranch den mother Grace (Helen Mirren). Grace takes control of Bruza’s career because of orders from her wild husband Charlie (Joe Pesci), who habitually cheats on his wife but frowns on her doing likewise. Taylor Hackford’s film is a misbegotten jumble that clumsily synthesizes various incongruous elements, from a poorly staged boxing match and vignettes concerning working girls’ mini-dramas to Grace and Bruza’s May-December romance, which is complicated by her fatal cancer and concludes with a limp cautionary morale about infidelity. Mirren’s game performance is no match for this laughably melodramatic material, while Pesci delivers such a rote impersonation of his profane persona that his every successive f-bomb sounds like a parodic joke.
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