★★
“Punched out.”
This was an interesting litmus test for your online bubble. It came out in the immediate wake of controversy over a commercial featuring the lead actress, promoted with the slogan, “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans.” This prompted criticisms this was promoting eugenics, and Sweeney’s refusal to apologize, led to a lot of “Bye-bye career!” gloating when Christy subsequently bombed, with one of the worst returns for a wide opening ever. [Not least from Ruby Rose] However, the subsequent huge success of The Housemaid proved otherwise. The reality is, this is not a very good entry in a genre which is not currently in favour. A far bigger budget and star in The Rock, couldn’t stop The Smashing Machine from tanking equally hard.
What you get is basically a three-course meal of cliches, combining the very best i.e. worst of sports movies, domestic abuse porn and lesbian empowerment. It seems to be happy to change the facts to suit the narrative. For example, when aspiring boxer Christy (Sweeney) is shows as winning her first pro fight in about thirty seconds of screen time by knockout; the reality was a humdrum six-round draw. When easily-checked elements are made up, it makes me sceptical of co-writer Mirrah Foulkes, when she said, “It was important to us to try and stick as close to historical accuracy as we could.” It leaves me suspicious of… Well, basically everything else the film has to say, about anything and anyone.
It’s a shame, because both leads are very good. Sweeney gained thirty pounds, trained for three and a half months to play the boxer, and refused to use a stunt double. She is thoroughly believable in the role, and whoever was responsible for the boxing scenes knows their stuff. Foster, as her abusive manager/husband Jim Martin, is also compellingly unpleasant, his arc going from tough love coach to stabbing and shooting Christy, rather than letting her leave. That, at least, is based in fact. Though is it wrong my first reaction, on watching her getting beaten up by someone 25 years older, was “Guess she can’t have been that good a boxer”? [Answer: yes, very wrong, I know]
The problems are more the film’s persistent reliance on tropes we’ve seen far too often: if there’s one montage to stirring music here, it feels like there are a dozen. If you’ve seen any movie about the sweet science since Rocky, you have basically seen this. And at a running time of 135 minutes, there’s a lot of space to be filled in between the boxing matches. These become less significant, the deeper we get into proceedings, the film teetering precariously on the edge of abuse porn, before Christy eventually escapes the horrors of her relationship. I’m glad she did, make no mistake, and I hope she’s now living her best life – the film is kinda vague on this point. But I can’t say this provided any information I wouldn’t have got from her Wikipedia article.
Dir: David Michôd
Star: Sydney Sweeney, Ben Foster, Merritt Wever, Katy O’Brian