Tag: mma/boxing

Cold Hell

  By

★★★
“Hell is other people.”

This an interesting entry, with a complex lead character who is quite some way from being conventionally “likeable”. Özge Dogruol (Schurawlow) is a Viennese taxi driver, who is harsh, abrasive and has severe anger issues. Indeed, anger is arguably among the least of her issues. She practices Thai boxing as an outlet. Or did, until a sparring session goes wrong, and she ends up breaking her partner’s nose in two places. One night, from her apartment, she sees the dead body of a woman in the opposite building, and the killer (Sheik) standing over the corpse. Unfortunately, he also sees Özge. The police won’t provide protection, and soon after, her cousin is murdered, in an apparent case of mistaken identity.

For a variety of reasons – some valid, such as her abusive father, others more self-inflicted – Özge has burned all her other bridges, both with friends and family. Having nowhere else to turn, she consequently ends up staying with Christian Steiner (Moretti), one of the detectives working on the case, which spans killings in several different countries. He has problems of his own, having to take of his elderly father (von Thun), who has dementia. Özge and Christian begin a relationship (which seems a bit of a violation of police ethics – maybe things are different in Austria), and she vows to kill the killer. But will Özge be able to carry out her goal before he gets to her?

There’s a saying: you will meet assholes in your life, but if everyone you meet is an asshole… you’re the asshole. I kept being reminded of this by Özge, who definitely has an asshole problem. Yet, despite having so many characteristics which would, in reality, make her someone I would actively avoid, I still found myself somewhat rooting for her, in a Dragon Tattoo kind of way. Partly, this is because there aren’t many better people in the film. Christian is likely the closest. But even he is far from perfect – even discounting the whole “sleeping with the main witness in a case of multiple murder” thing. It does end up relying on some fortuitous coincidence, and as heroines go, Özge is remarkably flame-resistant, shall we say.

This plays into the killer’s philosophy. He skins and burns alive Muslim prostitutes because he wants them to experience what hell will be like. Özge has a Muslim background, though is hardly devout, and the film does lean a little heavily into the sexism, racism and anti-police angles, especially in the early going. It gets more nuanced in some areas as we get deeper in, though I’d be quite surprised if Özge actually learns any valuable life lessons. Although not all the choices here are successful, I do have to respect the effort to try and do something a bit different in the genre. I certainly won’t deny I found the ending highly satisfying, and appropriately fiery.

Dir: Stefan Ruzowitzky
Star: Violetta Schurawlow, Tobias Moretti, Sammy Sheik, Friedrich von Thun
a.k.a. Die Hölle

1 More Round

  By

★★★
“I am Jim’s Complete Lack of Surprise.”

Reading the comments on YouTube, there’s an awful lot of “inspirational” and “motivational” to be found there, and these are not wrong. This is as template-based a sports movie as you can imagine, to the point that it feels almost more like a Victorian melodrama, in terms of its saintly heroine, fighting (literally) for what she believes in. This sort of thing would normally be completely ludicrous, and isn’t helped by James Schafer’s soundtrack, which leaves no orchestral cliché uncued. However… I found a genuine sincerity on display here, helped by a very good performance from Stone, and this really sells the sub-Hallmark conceit at its core. Her character believes, so you do. 

She plays up-and-coming amateur MMA fighter Jackie DeSpain, whose life has issues. She lives with her junkie sister Marie, whose little daughter Grace (Darling), is simply as adorable as a boxful of kittens. This situation preys on Jackie’s mind, causing her to lose a fight against Kate ‘The Killer’ Kinsella, much to the concern of her trainer, Hank (Wade). For when I say “lose”, we’re deep in “beaten to a pulp” territory. Though a positive is, this brings her into contact with hunky doctor Oliver (Akers). After Marie overdoses, Grace is taken away by the authorities, but if Jackie can just win enough fights to turn pro, then maybe she can convince a judge that she should have custody of her niece, while Marie rehabs. 

You should easily be able to figure out from the above, where everything is going to go the rest of the way, and the film does not deviate from that template an iota. Will there be training montages? Could there be an injury threatening to derail Jackie’s plans? Might there be – oh, I’m just speculating here – blossoming romance between Jackie and Oliver? I’ll never tell. But despite the resolute predictability of proceedings, I remained engaged to a greater degree than you would imagine. Lyde has directed a number of films we’ve reviewed here, most recently Scarlett, also starring Stone, and the action here is good. If the MMA fights are somewhat stylized, they’re still credible, and have more impact than I was expecting.

There is, however, a curious lack of any antagonist here: just about everybody is nice: even the social worker who whisks Grace away into the care of the state is quite apologetic about it. Kinsella is likely the closest, yet she is more of an obstacle than an enemy, vanishing completely from the film between her fights against Despain. Despite the lack of dramatic conflict, and a large dose of the review tagline (top) as things wound there way forward, I bought into Jackie’s situation, and unquestionably found myself cheering her on. While this may be the simplest of stories, I found it executed well enough to overcome the limitations of its plot.

Dir: John Lyde
Star: Melanie Stone, Jasen Wade, Isaac Akers, Rosie Darling
[The film is available now on YouTube and is embedded below]

Girl Fight: A Muay Thai Story

  By

★★★
“How to get punched in the face.”

When you think of the martial art form known as Muay Thai, New Jersey is probably not the first place to come to mind. But it’s in the town of Toms River, on the Jersey Shore, that Prairie Rugilo set up an all-women’s gym with the aim of teaching students Muay Thai. It began as occasional classes she taught in the Brick Police Athletic League, but demand allowed her to set up her own, dedicated space. If you don’t know, Muay Thai is described here as “the art of eight limbs”, which personally, raises more questions than it answers. What are the other four limbs? Was it developed by Thai spiders? Let’s just call it a form of kickboxing, and move on.*

Rugilo and her girlfriend, Jaime Phillips, a detective sergeant with the Ocean County Sheriff’s Department, train their students in the style. For some, it’s just a way to get fit, but others want to put their skills to practice in the ring, and this documentary follows two in particular: DeAna Mendez and Hazelle Dongui-is. We see them going through the preparations, their first fights, and the aftermath. Though the film seems least interested in the actual bouts, where it feels like we get to see more of the audience, than any coherent footage of the action.

But that’s actually ok. Rugilo loses more fights than she wins, and her students achieve mixed results too. For example, Mendez loses her first bout, and has a chance at redemption yanked away, because her opponent has to withdraw after Lasik surgery. She ends up going to another gym where she can train along with her young son (an issue with that whole “women only” thing). Dongui-is is the most successful, but we see least of her. What I did find particularly fascinating was a strong emphasis on the mental elements. Rugilo reckons her first loss is largely because her opponent was switched out at the last minute, and she couldn’t get into the right head-space. It seems the result can be decided before you enter the ring.

I did like Rugilo, who has an impressive attitude, and takes victory or defeat in her stride. I loved her speech at the end: “You know life isn’t always gonna go our way. It’s not always easy, and it’s not always happy, but we learn to overcome those setbacks… We can just learn from them and get stronger and be a better person on the other end of it.” That’s empowering, even as a I sit here on my couch with a bag of Doritos. You may well leave this with a little more respect for those willing to get in the ring, and be punched in the face. And a little less interest in ever doing anything like that yourself.

Dir: Matthew Kaplowitz
Star: Prairie Rugilo, Jaime Phillips, DeAna Mendez, Hazelle Dongui-is

* – I subsequently found out the eight limbs are two each of the hands, elbows, feet and knees. Never say this site is not educational.

Fight to Live

  By

★★★½
“One tough mother.”

Bec ‘Rowdy’ Rawlings is an Australian mixed martial-artist, who fought in the UFC for a bit, and then became the first woman to win a bare-knuckle boxing world title. This documentary covers her life, from growing up as a teenage tearaway, through motherhood transforming her character, her discovery of mixed martial-arts, a disastrous and highly toxic first marriage, and escaping that to become eventually the Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship federation’s Women’s Featherweight World Champion. Phew. That’s quite a lot to get through in less than eighty minutes. The film does a decent job of covering its bases, through interviews with Bec, and her family and friends, plus no shortage of archive footage of Rawlings, both in and out of the ring.

Everyone in it, but Bec in particular, comes over as down-to-earth: it might be an Aussie thing. Certainly, she makes for an interesting contrast to the more… outspoken American and male MMA fighters, like Conor McGregor. Rawlings seems almost humble, speaking of the respect she has for anyone tough enough to get in the ring. Admittedly, this is likely in contrast to her early years when she was very much on the path to delinquency. Particularly awkward, since her sister was a police officer, who remembers getting a radio call describing a suspect, and knowing immediately that it was her sibling. But parenthood flicked a switch, and Bec realized after having her first son Zake, she needed to take responsibility for her actions.

However, life took a darker turn in her relationship with fellow MMA fighter, Dan Hyatt. For three years, he abused her, both physically and mentally. At one point in the documentary, the interviewer asks for specifics of what he did, and… Well, to be honest, it feels unnecessarily invasive, and almost exploitative: I didn’t feel like the details added anything. Eventually, she was able to escape the situation, and it certainly appears to be a case of “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.” While the recovery process took a number of years, she can now look back on the horrors of that period in her life, and as Rawlings says, it happened to her, but does not define who she is, an awesome attitude.

To be honest though, I was more interested in the sporting side of the documentary, which follows Bec as she prepares to defend her title belt in Cancun, Mexico, against Cecilia Flores. She won – hey, it’s on her Wikipedia page – although it’s a little odd that this fight took place back in February 2019, but the film basically ends there, with only a couple of captions covering the five years between then and its release. I had, again, to check Wikipedia for more up-to-date information. After spending time fighting for Bellator, she’s now back fighting for the BKFC, winning her last (at time of writing) bout in January 2025. More power to her, both in the ring and as a mother.

Dir: Tom Haramis
Star: Bec Rawlings, Adrian Rodriguez, Mal Van, Jacqui Rawlings

EFC

  By

★★½
“Ducks one set of cliches, walks right into another.”

I wanted to like this more than I did, because the makers are aware of the tropes of the mixed martial arts genre, and in the first half, make a concerted (and largely successful) effort to avoid them. However, the movie is much less successful in the second half, and ends up replacing those cliches with a different set. The result leaves the film just as formulaic – albeit not in the direction I expected. It begins in expected fashion, with a title bout in the EFC, between Alexa Star (Aboya) and Cassady Jones (Rose). The former prevails, but the champion is then attacked after the bell by her opponent.

For reasons never quite explained, Star is stripped of the title, and an eight-woman tournament set up to crown a new champion. This event is hotly anticipated, due to the previous events having gone viral. However, sleazy shareholder Frank Russo (Zeppieri) has other plans, to asset strip the federation, in contrast to EFC President Donna Carter (Jones), who wants to make women’s MMA the equal of the men’s version. I was expecting the tournament to progress to the expected Star-Jones rematch, saving the company in the process. Doesn’t happen. For Cassady loses her first round bout, but Carter throws her a lifeline, suggesting that with the business degree, she can be of more help to the federation as a manager, fighting in the boardroom rather than the ring.

This was definitely not what I was expecting, and credit to the script for going in this unexpected direction. However, it feels as if they are much less comfortable in the world of high-finance, television right and leveraged buyouts. These elements never ring true, and there’s a certain point where it becomes easy to predict where things will end up. If you guess this may be with Cassady making an impassioned plea to the shareholders, to elect her to the board and let her take the company to the next level… I can neither confirm nor deny. There’s also a subplot about fighters failing their drugs tests, which gets started, then dropped very quickly, only to resurface out of nowhere as a “gotcha” for Russo.

I think I might have preferred the results if the film had stuck to the beaten track, because the action sequences are well-staged enough, that they do not deserve to get sidelined in favour of unconvincing business negotiations. All the actresses involved manage to look the part, and at least give the impression of knowing their way around a punching-bag. Less successful is Rose’s transition from MMA to MBA, especially after you’ve heard her character unleash a torrent of F-bombs at Donna for daring to suggest Cassady use her college degree. Her academic credentials should have been established first, with an intellectual fighter in itself being a novel proposition. The overall result is something which I can’t call a success. Yet as failures go, it’s definitely one of the more interesting.

Dir: Jaze Bordeaux
Star: Karlee Rose, Richard Zeppieri, Kathryn Aboya, Stephanie Jones

Knockout Blessing

  By

★★★
“Punches above its weight.”

Always a pleasure to cross another country off the map, and this is the first movie we have ever reviewed here from Nigeria. Indeed, entries from anywhere in Africa have been very limited, and in general, I found this a pleasant surprise. In some countries, film-makers appear to be trying simply to imitate Hollywood. That’s not the case here: this feels Nigerian, and is all the more entertaining as a result. What it may lack in hardcore action, was made up for me by the glimpse it provided into local culture. The differences are what gave this flavour – though as we’ll see, it appears we are united by a general disdain for politicians and their behaviour!

It begins in a small village where Blessing (Laoye) is the grand-daughter of a boxer, who has brought her up and certainly passed on his skills, leaving Blessing fully deserving of her titular nickname. However, after she punches out the son of a rich local, who was attempting to force himself on her, and he dies as a result, her father is killed by a mob, and she is forced to flee to the city. There, she falls in with a group of hookers, including Hannah (Meg Otanwa) and Oby (Ejiofor). They end up working for low-level gangster Dagogo (Franklin), honey-trapping men whom Blessing then knocks unconscious so they can be robbed. Her goal is to raise funds which Dagogo says he will use to get her a passport to America.

When this shows little signs of happening, Blessing grows reluctant, so Dagogo says he needs just one last job. It’s a high-risk, high-reward job, to steal some diamonds from the notorious Gowon (Adedoyin). Naturally, as “one last jobs” do, it goes wrong. While they get the case, it instead contains a hard drive, with a very incriminating video, depicting the President of Nigeria… Well, let’s just say, there’s a goat involved. [Told you there’s no love lost for politicians] Needless to say, both Gowon and the President are extremely keen to get the drive back, and will stop at nothing to do so. This leaves Blessing and her pals trying to get it to a friendly journalist and online, before the loose ends they represent are tidied up.

This was consistently entertaining. My (admittedly limited) experience of Nollywood left my expectations low, and this surpassed them on most levels: the script, performances and direction are all fine. Credit Adedoyin in particular, whose suit-wearing Gowon becomes a very convincing and menacing villain. It’s never dull, and no special knowledge of Nigerian life and culture is needed here. I did wish more use had been made of Blessing’s pugilistic talents. There’s a significant chunk in the middle, where it feels like the movie forgets about its heroine. Blessing did enough in the early going to win our affections, and she deserves better than to be sidelined. I was still left with an interest in seeing more Nigerian cinema, and that’s not what I expected on the way in.

Dir: Dare Olaitan
Star: Ade Laoye, Bucci Franklin, Ademola Adedoyin, Linda Ejiofor

Fighter’s Life

  By

★★½
“Knocked down by the clichés”

If you fed an AI all the sports movies ever made, and then asked it to write a script, what you’d get is likely something close to this. Here’s a challenge: write down ten clichés you find in a film like this, then watch the movie (conveniently embedded below), and see how many show up. I’m willing to bet most of those on your list would be present here. The main saving grace is that the execution is done with a complete lack of self-awareness. It feels as if the writers genuinely had no clue they were treading a path which was more of a groove. Everyone involved in this is so earnest, it just about gets away with it.

Here’s the plot. Let’s count the clichés. Xia Yun (Xia) dreams of a career in MMA (#1). However, she’s stuck working in her family restaurant (#2), run by her father after her mother left them (#3). She gets a chance to enter a prestigious tournament (#4), the prize money for which could clear her father’s debts (#5). However, her trainer comes under pressure for Xia to throw a match (#6). Despite this, she reaches the semi-finals, where she suffers a setback (#7), losing to a Brazilian fighter. It’s subsequently revealed her opponent cheated (#8), giving our heroine the chance to win it all (#9), in front of her mother (#10). Oh, yeah, add a freebie: there might be a life-threatening illness involved at some point as well (#bonus).

The other issue is, there’s a lot of stuff outside the octagon to cram in, especially when the film is only seventy-two minutes long. There’s surprisingly little actual fighting in it: certainly more drama, and possibly even more training sequences, of one form or another. This is a bit of a shame, since Xia Jiao looks more convincing than the actresses in many a Hollywood film. Not least in her quick hands, which suggest she might be a fighter trained to act, rather than an actress trained to fight. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know: if not, then a “well done” to Xia for making it look convincing. Or at least convincing enough to fool my (admittedly, untrained) eyes.

The brief running-time may work in the film’s favour, in that it can hardly be accused of outstaying its welcome. It’s technically solid, and though clearly smaller in scale, doesn’t look cheap. The components are in pace for a decent, quick-paced action film; it’s just that the makers don’t appear particularly interested in delivering one. They seem more interested in the dramatic elements: as noted above, those aspects are absolutely nothing you have not seen, many times before, and the execution does little to elevate them. A hat-tip to Denis for pointing me in the direction of this one: I’m always looking for suggestions, and it certainly wasn’t the worst I’ve seen – even this week. There’s just little here to merit a second viewing.

Dir: Huang Binhao
Star: Xia Jiao, Yu Shan Chuan, Bai Yao, Sarah Chen

The Killing Complex, by K.G. Leslie

  By

Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆½

There’s something to be said for sparse simplicity, and this delivers on that concept in spades. Except for occasional flashbacks, the entire things takes place in one location: a facility somewhere in Europe. It’s where Cassie ends up, locked in a cage, after being abducted while on a trip from Britain, intending to find herself. She’s then deposited in a hall and made to fight for the amusement, gambling or whatever of online spectators. She starts off facing animals, but through pharmaceutical treatment, her strength, speed and savagery are enhanced, and the opponents – both fauna and, eventually, her own species too – become more vicious. The shock collar around her neck ensures her compliance.

In the early going, much of this unfolds inside Cassie’s head, as she goes through what perhaps seems inspired by the five stages of grief, from rejecting the reality of her predicament, through anger, and ending up in a personal commitment to do whatever is necessary in order to survive – even if this comes at the cost of her own humanity. But just when she’s on the edge of becoming a soulless killing machine, she’s relocated, and placed next to another prisoner, Thomas. He was also abducted, but more recently, so hasn’t been ground down by his situation yet, and his optimism reignites Cassie’s own interest in life. But is everything quite what it seems, or are there other agendas at work?

Without giving them away, there are a couple of very effective twists here, which I did not see coming – and, indeed, I defy anyone to say they did. The first is something of a cheat, considering how much of the time to that point has been Cassie’s internal monologue, and this has carefully hid a key piece of information. But the second works particularly well, because it demonstrates that the bad guys here aren’t stupid: Carrie is going to need to do more than bludgeon her way out. Good though she certainly is at that, as is proven repeatedly. This isn’t a book for animal rights activists though, with Cassie working her way up from herbivores to the top of the food chain, in addition to her human opponents.

I do wonder quite why the people are wasting the remarkable drugs, which help Cassie survive massive damage as well as enhance her fighting abilities, on an inter-species fight club. I’d have said the military-industrial complex would pay better than Fanduel for that stuff. But sadistic perverts gonna pervert, I guess, and so here we are. By the end, I was galloping through the pages, staying up well past my usual bedtime to do the dreaded “one more chapter.” It does end on something of a cliffhanger: usually that’s something I don’t like, but I didn’t feel like I’d been sold half a story here, and can definitely see further entries appearing here down the road.

Author: K.G. Leslie
Publisher: Self published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 3 in the Killing saga.

Knuckle Girl

  By

★★★
“Punches below its weight.”

This film is based on a Korean webcomic, but has been relocated to Japan. I can’t help wondering if something was lost in the process, because it feels like I should have liked this more than I did. Ran Tachibana (Miyoshi) is a promising amateur boxer, who gets devastating news when the body of her sister Yuzuki is found inside a burned-out vehicle. The cops call it suicide and quickly close the case. Except Ran doesn’t believe the corpse is Yuzuki, and begins to investigate what might have happened. The search leads her to an underground fight club run by the brutal Nikaido (Ito), who is holding Yuzuki hostage. He makes Ran an offer: beat his undefeated champion, and he’ll let Yuzuki go.

Naturally, it’s not as simple as that, with Nikaido reneging on his word. Fortunately, Ran has help in the shape of bike mechanic Kamiya (Maeda) and hacker Naruse (Hosoda), who help her go after Nikaido and take down his operation. There’s also concerns on the criminal side, with Nikaido’s bosses feeling he’s a loose cannon. It all feels too much to cram into a single movie, and I suspect it might have been better served in the form of a TV series. As is, elements like Yuzuki’s “magic blood” don’t appear to have much purpose. They seem there purely so fans of the comic will go “Oh, yeah!” and make little or no sense to casual viewers like me.

I think it’s probably a case whee less would have been more in terms of plotting. Keep it simple, perhaps removing side characters like Kamiya or Naurse, and focus just on Ran infiltrating the fight club and working her way up through it. Sure, it wouldn’t score points for originality, but it might have sustained my attention better. As is, in between the action, I must confess this sometimes struggled to retain focus. Considering the obviously non-trivial amount of resources that went into the production, it’s a shame they didn’t put as much effort into the story. For this undeniably looks spiffy, with the underground arena, in the shape of an eye, well-designed, and I liked the over-perky pair of MCs as well.

But I’m here for the fights, and these were… decent enough. I appreciated that the film acknowledged the heroine’s lack of size, and explicitly discussed how she would need to use her speed and agility to beat larger opponents. That’s true, even with the equalizer of knuckle-dusters, given to her by Nikaido to even up the betting odds a little. Miyoshi only had a few months training, but it’s likely easier to train an actress to fake fight, than a fighter to fake act, and it’s adequately convincing. But there are really only three or four sequences in the whole thing, with the story having to rush past most of them, because it has to deal with all the other elements. It’s all okay, I suppose, yet definitely feels like a wasted opportunity.

Dir: Hong-Seung Yoon
Star: Ayaka Miyoshi, Gôki Maeda, Hideaki Ito, Kanata Hosoda

The Way

  By

★★½
“Well, I did not see THAT coming…”

I think it has been a long time since a film has so completely yanked the carpet out from under me. We might have to go back all the way to David Lynch’s Lost Highway, and that was 1997. So it has been a while. I’m not sure if it works here. It did in Highway; I’m just uncertain whether Khalili is as good a film-maker as Lynch. It’d likely require a second viewing to decide, and I wasn’t that impressed elsewhere to justify a repeat. I will remember it though, and that’s more than can be said for many of the films I review here. So it was not a complete waste of time. 

It’s the story of Jane Arcs (Jane), whom we first meet as she is on death row, preparing for her execution. Over a decade previously, she had killed another woman during an underground mixed martial-arts match, and was subsequently sentenced to death for it. Initially bitter and still filled with rage, in jail she met Qi Gong Master Xin (Wong), and learned from her how to manage her emotions, through both physical and mental training. Now, Jane is considerably more at peace with her imminent death than others around her. Most notably, guard Max Stone (Watson), who has come to care for Jane over the previous 13 years, and will go to any lengths to stop her being executed. 

This is, at least for the first hour, more of a redemptional drama than anything. There are a lot of flashbacks to Jane’s life on the outside, and we see what happened there. First, there’s the fight in question: while undeniably brutal, I am still not sure why it was deemed a capital crime. That’s especially so, given the extenuating circumstances which we then see, going a long way to explaining why Jane was overflowing with anger at life. Oddly – and this is another Lynchian touch – Watson also plays Ben Jorden, the father of Jane’s child on the outside. Otherwise, though, it’s a fairly straightforward story, albeit one that leans heavily into cliché. For instance, Xin often sounds more like a fortune cookie, saying things like, “The only respect you need is self-respect.”

And then… Wait, what just happened? You will take a few minutes to figure that out, and even when you do, you may well not be able to wrap your head around it adequately. I even Googled for an interview with the director, hoping to get some explanation. No dice – and in the end, it may be better that way. I suspect it might well fall short of satisfying. By the end, I was left with a furrowed brow, and it’s perhaps a little unfortunate. For if the story is otherwise too obvious and with gaps in its logic, I did appreciate the performances. Jane puts over an inner strength that is impressive. Shame it is so thoroughly overshadowed by the abrupt left-turn towards the end.

Dir: Dastan Khalili
Star: Eli Jane, Kelcey Watson, Joan Wong, Lorenzo Antonucci