"Million Dollar Baby" is generating astonishing critical word of mouth, figuring prominently in the year-end voting for critics awards and winning Eastwood best-directing honors from the New York Film Critics Circle.

Have any of the critics praising "Million Dollar Baby" actually ever seen another movie -- any movie?

A compendium of every cliché from every bad boxing melodrama ever made, "Million Dollar Baby" (written by Paul Haggis from stories by F.X. Toole) tries to transcend its cornball overfamiliarity with the qualities that have long characterized Eastwood's direction -- it's solemn, inflated and dull.

Eastwood plays Frankie Dunn, a journeyman boxing trainer who has never gotten a shot at a title. Shortly after the movie begins, a boxer who seems to offer Frankie a chance at just that deserts him for another manager. Frankie seems destined to remain stuck in his ratty old Los Angeles gym, along with his avuncular sidekick, a former boxer named -- no kidding -- Scrap (Morgan Freeman), seemingly to end his days training one second-rater after another.

Scrap steers Frankie to Maggie (Hilary Swank), a waitress already in her 30s (in other words, an age at which many boxers are starting to think of retiring) who has been haunting the gym, diligently, if not very skillfully, working out. After some persuasion from Maggie, Frankie takes her on and she turns out to be a winner, bringing Frankie closer and closer to his dream of a shot at a title.

Over the course of his career, Eastwood has gone from playing the Man with No Name, a "Don't mess with me" loner, to playing a series of sentimentalized old geezers. Frankie is the latest. There's some unspecified heartbreak in his past involving a daughter he writes to faithfully every week. (The letters are always returned.) And if the alienated daughter and dashed dreams aren't enough fodder for the blubber machine, there's the thread that runs through the movie of Frankie trying valiantly to hold onto his faith, attending Mass every day, saying his prayers at night.

How can audiences not laugh at the sight of Eastwood moaning and groaning as he drops to his knees to say his bedtime prayers? It's not the act of prayer that's worthy of being laughed at -- it's Eastwood's cheap grab at audience sympathy by playing up Frankie's aches and pains. Eastwood, still in fine condition at 74, wears his pants hiked up so that it looks as if his belt is trying to locate his nipples.

"Million Dollar Baby" features not just one wise old codger but two. When Eastwood and Morgan Freeman share the screen they act as if they're in a competition to win the right to be called "Pops." (Can remakes of "West Side Story" or "Song of the South" be far behind?)

At least when Burgess Meredith did this stuff in the "Rocky" movies he had the good hammy sense to treat it like the hokum it was. "Million Dollar Baby" is a piece of ham intended for those who keep kosher. Its dried-out, humorless achieved grubbiness is meant to purify it, to lift it above its melodramatic roots. Eastwood's performance is one long wince, and he directs as if it would hurt him to throw in a little lightness, a little color, one scene that didn't look like it was shot in a gas station bathroom.

The alleged cinematography by Tom Stern is a visual insult. At times Stern seems to be trying to see how many different shades of dingy green can fit into one picture. And, as almost all of Eastwood's films are, the movie is so underlit that you begin wondering if somebody at Warner Bros. forgot to go shopping for light bulbs.