That '70s Drift, Part III: Palookaville

CHUCK (C+) - This surprisingly inert biopic struggles to communicate a reason for being. Liev Schreiber disappears into the role of Chuck Wepner, a tomato can from Bayonne, N.J., who is plucked from obscurity to fight the heavyweight champ, Muhammad Ali, thus inspiring Sylvester Stallone's "Rocky" story.

Canadian director Philippe Falardeau ("Monsieur Lazhar") never establishes a grip on this shambling script from four writers, including Schreiber, suggesting a labor of love by the actor. Too often this period piece is content to fetishize the sleazy '70s and wallow in the horrid fashions, not unlike recent HBO TV duds like "Vinyl" and "The Deuce."

Schreiber lays the Jersey accent on thick, and Elisabeth Moss, as his wife, Phyliss, goes toe-to-toe with him in striving for lower-class authenticity. It's a draw. Naomi Watts looks lost -- "What accent is this? What era am I in?" -- as a feather-haired bartender, Linda, who catches Chuck's roving eye. Only Ron Pearlman, as Wepner's crude trainer, finds joy and zip in a character. And you would be hard pressed to find an actor with less charisma than Pooch Hall as a bizarrely low-key Ali.

When it comes to the inevitable comparisons to great fight films like "Raging Bull," "Chuck" can run but it can't hide. Much of this ground has been covered ad nauseam, whether in Scorcese's classic biopic, or Stallone's fictionalized masterpiece. "Chuck" revisits an era -- late '70s, early '80s -- and comes off as derivative dress-up.

THUNDERBOLT AND LIGHTFOOT (1974) (B-minus) - Back to the actual '70s, when men were men, character actors were character actors, and guns and cars were the tools of the trade. This is the directorial debut of Michael Cimino ("The Deer Hunter").

Here the buddy road movie meets the heist flick. Clint Eastwood and a young Jeff Bridges meet cute, with Eastwood's Thunderbolt (he's known for blowing open safes) on the lam from some hitmen and hitching a ride with Bridges' Lightfoot in the kid's stolen car. It turns out that the hitmen are old buddies of Thunderbolt, veterans of a bank job that left half a million dollars missing somewhere in a schoolhouse in Montana.

After Thunderbolt and Lightfoot learn that the schoolhouse has apparently been razed and replaced, Red (George Kennedy) and Eddie (Geoffrey Lewis) finally catch up to them, and they eventually believe Thunderbolt when he says he did not double-cross them. The four decide to team up, go back undercover, and rob the same bank.

Cimino flashes a confident, gritty visual style. Eastwood broods like he did throughout the '70s. Bridges is at the pupal stage of his career, still trying to figure out how to really act. Kennedy is the secret weapon here, playing a flustered thug with a short fuse. He and Lewis offer a Laurel & Hardy slapstick tone to the rather ominous proceedings.

This lumbers along leisurely, landing just shy of two hours. It has its moments, but Cimino struggles to mold it into a cohesive work of art. It's more of a time capsule than a classic.