OTC50 #123

by PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The rising star in women’s boxing starts out with nothing in a small West Virginia town.

And Christy Martin almost ends up with nothing despite becoming a prominent female boxer.

Director David Michod creates a linear narrative for the title character with several twists and turns to show the road ahead is fraught with great peril.

The ‘another boxing film’ rings differently as the script occasionally finds social issues, such as gender equality and family violence, just as important as training.

Sydney Sweeney removes all the glamour from her screen character to perform more as a gym jock than a Hollywood starlit. The floppy hair cuts and baggy clothing of the era make everything fit a bit better.

Sweeney though creates just the right type of character who can endure the hours in the gym getting ready for that ‘next fight’ with a payday that will set everybody up for life.

The pickings are slim at first at $300 a fight. But those tough girl challenges bring professional attention to Christy as her raw talent may become even more special after a few weeks of professional training.

Ben Foster plays boxing trainer Jim Martin who initially wants nothing to do with a girl boxer (sound familiar) until he sees Christy’s knock out punch. Martin becomes more and more enthusiastic, but he cannot line up bigger fights for Christy.

Sweeney works through plenty of scenes of Christy training in the gym and running on the road, but the camera also follows Christy when she is not boxing, such as being content with spending time in a trailer after escaping her childhood home where her parents had begun to question her individuality.

The twist in the storyline occurs when Jim and Christy start connecting on an emotional level, as one might expect when two people spend so much time together. The rising sports star narrative then begins to move along side the ‘girl and boy kissing in a tree’ narrative, especially after the two love birds get married.

Christy transitions out of the trailer home, while the boxing continues on in front of bigger and bigger audiences.

A score wending through the scenes suggests something is up, other than boxing, well before the scene sequences begin to hint there is something wrong in love land. Of course, with the money from bigger boxing purses, comes recreational drugs, which induce the jealous husband to show more and more of his true self.

Christy can no longer just walk away, though, when the realization sets in that Jim might not be all that nice of a human being. Christy must stay because she only knows boxing, and only knows boxing through Jim.

Michod maintains an unglamorous movie aesthetic with all the main characters struggling with life while the leading players only having accumulated a modest house and a yellow sportscar for him, and a pink sportscar for her.

The first next big fight eventually does happen after Christy and Jim are introduced to sports promotor Don King. King wants to put Christy on the undercard of a Mike Tyson fight, and Christy aint gonna let nobody take the opportunity away from her.

Sweeney puts a lot into creating a character distinct from her performance in other recent movies as her Hollywood star rises. Christy has this toughness in the ring but then she also has a naïve vulnerable side that results in her beginning to suffer in her personal life.

The film is a bit of a throw back to the early nineties, with the scenes filled with low budget cars one step from the scrapyard, especially with the owners not minding too much about detailing the bodies and changing the engine oil.

The boxing genre film gradually turns in on itself with Christy using great technique to beat up opponents in the ring only to eventually get beat up at home.