Sydney Sweeney delivers quite charismatically here as a young woman coming to terms with her own identity, whilst discovering she has quite a powerful punch. She, Christy Salters, has to keep her relationship with Rosie (Jess Gabor) under wraps from her slightly zealous mother (Merritt Wever) as her fighting skills attract the attention of a promoter who sees potential in her no-mercy style of fighting and who sends her to his trainer Jim Martin (Ben Foster). Initially, this man just wants shot of her but gradually learns to appreciate that she has a shot at something bigger. It’s made clear that any fluidity in her sexuality is not going to be tolerated, and with Rosie finding a new man she is soon hooked up with, and married to, Jim. A career under the auspices on the enigmatic Don King (Chad Coleman) now beckons, with all it’s commitment, dedication and dollars - but as she succeeds, we all begin to realise there are cracks a-plenty in her personal life, cocaine starts to play it’s part and the dynamic of her relationship with her husband becomes more oppressive and controlling. Professionally, things are set to come to an head with her famous fight against Laila Ali and personally, how long can this toxic marriage last? The story of this woman’s achievements is certainly worth telling, and I do recall the hype around the Ali fight in 2003, but despite Sweeney’s best efforts I just found this to be an unevenly paced and frankly rather sterile depiction of Martin’s life. It spends far too long on the development phase, skirts over too much of that which makes her personable and drifts all too often into a disappointing melodrama that robs the thing of much of the vitality that this ought to have delivered. Foster looks the part, ok, but again his character is left undercooked and I really struggled to get to grips with why she ever fell for him in the first place, much less married him - especially when he presented her with a pink kit. For a film that is about addiction, in many different forms, it hasn’t any sense of urgency or spark - indeed, I did find myself looking at my watch a couple of times as this 2¼ hours plods along. What action scenes there are are well presented, but there aren’t really enough of them to help this immerse us in the very visceral and conflicted nature of this woman’s life, and in many ways this was just as much a mismatch as many of her early fights. Pity.
