By Bruce Mitchell, PWTorch columnist

I haven't seen the new movie "The Wrestler," starring the juiced up, torn down Mickey Rourke.

I will, though, breaking my rule never to see wrestling movies - at least fictional ones. The reason is simple - "Nacho Libre," "Ready To Rumble," "No Holds Barred," whatever, they usually suck out loud and not in any way you're going to learn anything from, except for don't go to wrestling movies, they suck out loud.

I haven't seen "The Wrestler," I haven't seen most movies, but I do read Entertainment Weekly, because I find it saves me time. I read about movies and TV shows I'll never see, celebrities I either don't know or don't care about, music I'll never listen to, and in twenty minutes or so I'm covered.

Sometimes, though, I'll read about something good I'll actually want to see - like a movie with a two-tiered story about a man who wrecked his talent and life living an entertainment lifestyle that isn't what the public thinks it is.

Mickey Rourke is a wreck. He was an actor that his peers expected to be the next Robert Deniro and he became a drug-drenched joke instead. He hated his life so much he quit acting altogether and went into boxing, until the beatings he took there destroyed his looks and forced him to quit that, too.

He revived his career as something of a freak performer, playing the Frankenstein-like Marv in Frank Miller's "Sin City" movie (that, I saw.) He looks more now like a broken down pro wrestler from the '70s and '80s like, say, Greg "The Hammer" Valentine, who Rourke talked to and drew from in his performance, than a maturing character actor of a certain age.

So Mickey Rourke, making a comeback in a small budget noir movie as the sad waste of talent who wants that one last chance in a business that is killing him inch by inch, may be up for an Oscar nomination, and he may carry his first hit movie in decades. "The Wrestler" may put his career back into the mainstream.

What "The Wrestler," or the new Norman Lear HBO wrestling drama, won't do, is spark any renewed fan interest in the business itself. All they will do is remind the mainstream what Vince McMahon, with all business of smiles talk, would prefer they forget - that the business of pro wrestling has all the sad drama of the most exploitive businesses.

These movies are just going to further cement what most of America learned about pro wrestling during the media storm that followed the Chris Benoit murder/suicide. They're going to make that much tougher to get that high-dollar advertising contract or make that crossover movie deal.

It's no more than Vince McMahon and the rest of the business deserve.

Bruce Mitchell has been a PWTorch columnist since September 1990. His collection of longer feature-length columns on the biggest stories and personalities of the last two decades of this industry is considered among the best writings on pro wrestling of all-time. His library of articles dating back to the early-'90s is available in the Bruce Mitchell Library at PWTorch.com's VIP subscription-based website.

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