An uninspired and undirected performance from Sydney Sweeney means there’s a fatal lack of power in this movie from director and co-writer David Michôd. It manages to be unsubtle without being powerful. His subject is Christy Salters Martin, who under the grinning tutelage of Don King became the world’s most successful female boxing champion in the 90s and 00s but faced a misogynist nightmare outside the ring.
The film fails to deliver the power of the traditional boxing movie, or the real importance of a story about domestic abuse and coercive control, or the sensory detail of true crime. It relies on the simple fact of a woman pioneeringly taking on what had once been solely a man’s sport and relapses into cliche. Christy, with her frizzy hair and brown contact lenses, doesn’t seem to plausibly develop as a character throughout the film, and it sometimes seems as if Michôd is slightly more engaged with her gargoyle of a husband-slash-manager Jim Martin, played by Ben Foster with a standard-issue combover and paunch.
The creepy Martin discovers Christy when she is nothing more than a high-school basketball enthusiast in the 1980s but with an amazing untrained gift for boxing. Christy’s reactionary homophobic mom Joyce is a cartoonish role on which Merritt Wever is wasted; she is intensely suspicious of Christy’s emotional relationships with young women and is delighted when Christy is bullied into accepting a marriage proposal from the overbearing and psychopathically jealous Martin. She effectively becomes complicit in Martin’s horrendous abuse, which involves Christy’s macabre forced participation in private sex bouts with men and porn videos. The growing nightmare of her marital situation runs alongside her increasing dominance of women’s boxing, especially once she is taken up by the shock-haired supremo himself Don King in a scene-stealing cameo from Chad Coleman.
The film glides along initially with an unbroken string of euphoric victories for Christy which after a while become tiresome; the record shows that Christy did in fact lose occasionally and losses are how boxers learn and become better at their craft – and it’s also how boxing movies become interesting. It apparently wants to contrast Christy doing well in the ring but taking the punches, literal and otherwise, outside it, and can only just about bring itself to concede that she lost to Laila Ali, daughter of Muhammad Ali. But even here it flinches from actually showing the moment of loss itself.
Sweeney has already shown what a superb and detailed performer she is in the FBI interrogation movie Reality, but this is far inferior: a stodgy, lifeless piece of work.
● Christy is in UK and Irish cinemas from 28 November.
