Christie’s Review – Sidney Sweeney beats boxing pioneer’s story into lifeless cliché | film

AAn uninspired and undirected performance from Sidney Sweeney means there is a fatal lack of agency in this film on the part of director and co-writer David Michaud. She is able to be subtle without being strong. Its subject is Christy Salters-Martin, who under the tutelage of a smiling Don King became the world’s most successful female boxer in the 1990s and 2000s, but faced a misogynistic nightmare outside the ring.

The film fails to deliver on the power of traditional boxing films, the real significance of a story about domestic violence and coercive control, or the sensual details of true crime. It is based on the simple fact that a woman takes a pioneering role in what was once a men-only sport and then reverts to cliché. Christie, with her curly hair and brown contact lenses, doesn’t seem to develop much as a character throughout the film, and it sometimes seems as if Michôd is a bit more preoccupied with the gargoyle of her husband’s manager, Jim Martin, played by Ben Foster with an ordinary set and a paunch.

A creepy Martin discovers Christy when she was nothing more than a high school basketball fan in the 1980s but with an amazing, untrained talent in boxing. Christie’s reactionary, homophobic mother, Joyce, is a cartoonish role in which Merritt Wever is wasted; She is highly suspicious of Christie’s romantic liaisons with young women and is delighted when Christie is bullied into accepting a marriage proposal from the arrogant and psychologically jealous Martin. She effectively becomes complicit in Martin’s horrific abuse, which includes Christie’s horrific forced participation in private sexual bouts with men and pornographic videos. The increasing nightmare of her marital situation goes hand in hand with her increasing dominance in women’s boxing, especially after she is taken over by the same shock-haired boss Don King in a scene-stealing cameo from Chad Coleman.

The film initially flows with a steady stream of exhilarating victories for Christie that become exhausting after a while; The record shows that Christie sometimes lost, and that losses are how boxers learn and become better at their craft — and it’s also how boxing movies become interesting. She clearly wants to compare Christie to doing well in the ring but taking punches, literally and otherwise, outside of it, and she can’t help but admit that she lost to Laila Ali, the daughter of Muhammad Ali. But even here he refrains from showing the moment of loss itself.

Sweeney has already shown what a fine, articulate actress she is in the real-life FBI interrogation film, but this is much lesser: a boring, lifeless work.

● Christie is in cinemas in the UK and Ireland from 28 November and in Australian cinemas on 8 January.