★★½
“Fight Club: Ladies’ Night”
You are probably not going to see a more relentless parade of cliched storyline elements than here. Anna (Akerman) is seeing her life fall apart. Her coffee-shop business is failing, her car just got repossessed and her love life is entirely non-existent. Best friend Charleen (Sloan) takes her to an underground fight club for women, who need to deal with their issues in a less feminine form than society allows, i.e. by beating the crap out of each other. There, she incurs the wrath of club bad girl, the undefeated Olivia (Thorne), who challenges Anna to a bout in two months. Luckily, she’s introduced to a boxing coach, Murphy (Baldwin), who used to train Sugar Ray. There’s romance too, in the shape of club doctor, Roy (Connolly), though Olivia has also set her sights on him. Can Anna overcome her inner doubts, and triumph over adversity, after a welter of training montages?
It hardly would count as a spoiler to reveal the result, with almost everything here being horribly underwritten. Anna is given a dead mother necessary to the plot, and a father who has just come out of the closet, which most certainly isn’t. I also question the entire underlying principal of the entire concept. In what universe does it make sense, when you are out of work, broke and on the edge of being homeless, to spend all your time training for an amateur MMA bout? DEAL WITH YOUR EVERYDAY PROBLEMS, PEOPLE. Naturally, all of those get conveniently hand-waved away, in another of the plot’s convenient contrivances. See also: the manner in the which the final fight unfolds, which is seriously foreshadowed in the most unsubtle of manners; the thoroughly unlikely way in which it proves to be a bonding experience between Anna and Olivia; or the disposal of the legal charges against the heroine.
Yet, there are a couple of elements which meant it did manage to hold my attention – though it was touch-and-go at some points. Akerman does a good job of selling her character, giving her an airy, if likable, persona that does leave you wanting to see her prevail over her misfortunes – even if they are, largely, of her own making [struggling business owners shouldn’t have a Prius]. But the most pleasant surprise was the action. I was expecting little or nothing on that front, yet mad props are due to fight choreographer Shauna Galligan, who delivers brawls that wouldn’t be out of place in a Scott Adkins or Jason Statham film. That begins early, with Anna’s first fight lasting only about five seconds – and if you can make the chick from Twilight look like a serious bad-ass in the cage, you’re clearly doing something right. It’s never going to be enough to salvage a script that’s intent only in ploughing along paths that are painfully well-travelled. Yet it did provide some unexpected pleasures, and I was left feeling my time had not been entirely wasted.
Dir: Paul Leyden
Star: Malin Akerman, Kevin Connolly, Bella Thorne, Dulcé Sloan