YMMV / Shadowboxer

• Hilarious in Hindsight: MoNique plays a character named Precious. Yeah.
• Narm: Two scenes take the already heavy sexual content and ramp it up to absurdity. The first is Vicki's response to Mikey crying after having killed a father, that being to immediately come onto him and to initiate a sex scene suddenly. The second is when Clay is shown to be having sex with a random woman as a vague business negotiation is going on, only to kill them and shoot his bodyguard in the foot after they interrupt him. It's an already out of place scene that should be disturbing but instead feels like it's out of a dark comedy.
  • Much of Clay's dialogue. Gems like "Open up big daddy", "I think you need a little dicky" and singing a rendition of Oh Christmas Tree make him very hard to take seriously as a threat.
• Questionable Casting: One of the biggest cases of this in film. The likeable and charismatic Cuba Gooding Jr.. as a Professional Killer with ice water in his veins (and irresistible sex symbol)? Helen Mirren as his mentor/mother figure/lover? Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a shady Back-Alley Doctor and Mo'Nique as his crack-addicted, verbally (and physically) abusive lover/benefactor? In the words of Nathan Rabin, the film's casting can only be described as Dadaist.