\n<\/p>\n
E<\/span>ven before Sydney Sweeney became better known for being in the centre of an increasingly absurd culture war, the unavoidable campaign to make her Hollywood\u2019s Next Big Thing was showing signs of fatigue. The Euphoria grad, who gave a resonant performance in Reality, scored a sleeper hit with glossed up romcom Anyone But You but audiences were more impressed than critics, including myself (I found her performance strangely stilted). There was little interest from either side in her nun horror Immaculate, and earlier this summer her incredulously plotted Apple movie Echo Valley went the way of many Apple movies (no one knows it exists).<\/p>\n Post-thinkpieces, two of her festival duds (Eden and Americana) disappeared at the box office and she now arrives at Toronto in need of a win. And what better way to achieve that by going for an old-fashioned awards play, taking on the role of alternately inspiring and tragic boxer Christy Martin. It\u2019s a role that\u2019s already been buzzed about for months (Sweeney has been busy laying the standard \u201cgruelling physical routine\u201d groundwork) and at a time when movies about female sport stars still remain thin on the ground despite a swell of interest in them off screen, it\u2019s a needed push in the right direction. But, as perfectly timed as this narrative might be, Christy just isn\u2019t nearly good enough, a by-the-numbers slog that fails to prove Sweeney\u2019s status as a one to watch.<\/p>\n She\u2019s a convincing force to be reckoned with inside of the ring, her training clearly having paid off as she confidently glides from fight to fight, but she can\u2019t get us to believe in all that much outside of it, an actor still trying too visibly hard to make it all seem effortless (a few scenes with a more-at-ease Katy O\u2019Brian, as another boxer, hint that she might have been the better choice). It\u2019s a hefty ask, Sweeney playing the boxer over 20 years as she faced various struggles, and ultimately an impossible one too, her unsureness preventing us from getting beyond the film\u2019s surface. Not that there\u2019s much more here, though, despite the wealth of detail at play, Australian director David Mich\u00f4d mostly sticking to the dog-eared playbook, at times that often make the film feel like Walk Hard but with boxing. There\u2019s an excess of loudly soundtracked montages in the first act, yet with such little development outside of them we\u2019re never quite sure what we should be feeling throughout, other than what we know from other boxing movies (it pales in comparison to last Toronto\u2019s far smarter female boxer biopic The Fire Inside).<\/p>\n It\u2019s a disappointingly rote way to tell the extraordinary life of Christy, who came from a mining family in West Virginia and found herself in the ring at a time when women weren\u2019t seen there, a rise that sadly involved Jim Martin (Ben Foster), an older manager who takes her on as client and then wife, controlling her career and entire sense of self. Even as she became a groundbreaking name in boxing, as Don King\u2019s first female star, her husband was there to bring her crashing back down to Earth. Over a fatiguing 135 minutes, we watch the rise and inevitable fall.<\/p>\n Mich\u00f4d broke out with the blazing crime drama Animal Kingdom, but there\u2019s none of that fire still burning here. The only real connection would be a continued interest in showing us the very worst of human behaviour, as we bear witness to Jim\u2019s vile treatment of his wife. It has an obvious visceral impact, but in how he chooses to linger on his final act of unspeakably awful violence, it can feel needlessly explicit. We know the beats of a boxing movie and a domestic violence drama all too well and neither side of the story is told in a way that doesn\u2019t feel overly reliant on cliche. Foster sticks to an overfamiliar odious mode (he might as well have been introduced with red flags) and while the excellent Merritt Wever is saddled with a one-note bad mum role, she does more with it than the film deserves from her.<\/p>\n Christy herself isn\u2019t written with any more depth than a Wikipedia summary (Don King tells her in one scene that she has \u201csome real personality\u201d but where that is, I couldn\u2019t tell you) and it betrays what could have been in smarter hands. The more uniquely interesting details of who she was \u2013 the wrestle between masculinity and femininity, how this played into struggles over her queerness and marital gender roles, how being crafted by a man turned her into a distrustful anti-feminist unwilling to recognise her groundbreaking impact and influence \u2013 are told to us in brief moments, but they never inform an otherwise ripped-from-a-TV-movie character. No wonder Sweeney struggles.<\/p>\n Christy Martin\u2019s life was filled with devastating blows but in her biopic, we barely feel the impact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Even before Sydney Sweeney became better known for being in the centre of an increasingly absurd culture war, the unavoidable campaign to make her Hollywood\u2019s Next Big Thing was showing signs of fatigue. The Euphoria grad, who gave a resonant performance in Reality, scored a sleeper hit with glossed up romcom Anyone But You but<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19413,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[820,6510,3618,11890,11891,1540,6018,1171,3546,1085,7906,4234,4297],"class_list":{"0":"post-19412","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-battle","9":"tag-biopic","10":"tag-boxing","11":"tag-christy","12":"tag-cliched","13":"tag-festival","14":"tag-fights","15":"tag-film","16":"tag-losing","17":"tag-review","18":"tag-sweeney","19":"tag-sydney","20":"tag-toronto"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19412","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19412"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19412\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/19413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}