POPCORN TIME

REVIEW: MILLION DOLLAR BABY

Reviewed by: Dawid van der Merwe
Rating: ★★★★½

Million Dollar Baby: A Haunting Knockout That Speaks to the Heart of Dignity

[SPOILER ALERT - If you haven't watched the movie, this review contains major plot details.]

Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby is more than a sports drama. It is a soul-searing meditation on autonomy, love, and the ethics of dying. In the quiet ache beneath the film’s pugilistic grit lies a question that sits at the core of the DignitySA campaign: What does it mean to live and die, with dignity?

The film follows Frankie Dunn (Eastwood), a weathered boxing trainer, and Maggie Fitzgerald (Hilary Swank), a determined underdog who walks into his gym and refuses to leave until he trains her. What unfolds is a deeply human story about aspiration, belonging, and ultimately, the cruel twists that life, and fate, can throw.

When Maggie suffers a catastrophic spinal injury at the peak of her boxing career, the film pivots from triumph to tragedy. Now quadriplegic, in constant pain, and dependent on machines, Maggie makes a final request of Frankie: to help her die. This moment, tender and devastating, becomes the film’s emotional fulcrum, forcing us to confront the moral complexities of assisted dying.

Frankie’s choice, carried out in agonizing silence, is not born of convenience or despair, but of profound love and respect. He honours Maggie’s wish not out of hopelessness, but because he sees her full humanity, even in her broken body. He sees her right to choose. Million Dollar Baby never lectures; it simply shows us the brutal dignity of one woman’s fight to control her end, when all else has been taken from her.

For DignitySA, which advocates for the legal right of terminally ill South Africans to choose a medically assisted death, Million Dollar Baby is not just cinema, it is testimony. It gives voice to the silenced, to those whose suffering is invisible behind hospital curtains and courtroom debates.

In Maggie’s story, we are reminded that compassion sometimes requires letting go, and that dignity is not defined by survival, but by agency. The film leaves us with no easy answers, but with one resonant truth: love does not always mean holding on. Sometimes, it means giving someone the freedom to leave.