Russell Crowe, Ron Howard, Brian Grazer and Akiva Goldsman -- star, director, producer and writer of "A Beautiful Mind" -- make another run at Oscar glory with "Cinderella Man," the true story of the boxer Jim Braddock, who made a surprise comeback years after being written off by the fight world.

Remember "Seabiscuit?" Imagine Crowe as the horse. Seriously. They'd love it if you did. It'd make it okay that Goldsman's screenplay reduces America's most ruinous decade to a few lines of expository dialogue, and Howard's prosaic imagery of hungry children and shamed family men lining up for government handouts.

Most shamed of all is Crowe's Braddock, who'd been a rising star of pugilism in the late 1920s, until a combination of bad timing and bad investments wiped out his fortunes; when we catch up to him again in 1933, he's struggling to keep his family together in a basement apartment, risking his health in shady bouts for extra cash.

And then luck comes calling; his former manager (Paul Giamatti) lands him a match that brings him back into the world, setting him on a course to battle the preening, vicious Max Baer (Craig Bierko) for the heavyweight championship. Baer has already killed two men in the ring, and isn't shy about threatening to do the same to our noble hero - which doesn't exactly make Jim's wife Mae (Renee Zellweger) terribly happy about her husband playing gladiator.

To call this a meat-and-potatoes drama would not be an insult, exactly; Howard doesn't have much time for nuance, and he paints the story in broad, obvious strokes - the decent, impoverished family man versus the wealthy, decadent womanizer, with the family man's very life on the line. There's not much more to it than that, as far as he's concerned.

If "Seabiscuit" hadn't been so unexpectedly artful, this film's journeyman qualities might not be so obvious, but that's timing for you: "Cinderella Man" is a perfectly acceptable B-movie, predictable from beginning to end. That's not to say it doesn't give you what you want, or that the performances can't be enjoyed; it just means it won't ever surprise you. It's two and a half hours of safe.

Universal's DVD strategy on "Cinderella Man" is simple: Quality, quality, quality. There's a distinct tinge of Oscar gold to the menus and the packaging, a burnished look that suggests the movie has already garnered its weight in awards and prizes.

Why, even the "standard" edition is a high-capacity DVD-14 jam-packed with extras - individual audio commentaries for Howard, Goldsman and co-writer Cliff Hollingsworth, 20 minutes of deleted scenes, featurettes on the casting, the production and the real Braddock, an interview with fight trainer Angelo Dundee and a nifty little vignette in which Howard, Grazer and Goldsman sit down with author Norman Mailer and let him talk about the Braddock-Baer match.

But they've really gone all-out in the two-disc Collector's Edition, an expensive hardcover package which throws in a glossy booklet, a quartet of "limited edition photo cards" (which looked an awful lot like promotional postcards to this writer) and a second DVD of extras, including another 15 minutes of deleted scenes, "Russell Crowe's Personal Journey: Becoming Jim Braddock," a half-hour featurette produced and narrated by Crowe himself, the full half-hour newsreel of the Braddock-Baer match at Madison Square Garden, and various other peeks at the production.