UNSTOPPABLE (2024) - Mark Reviews Movies

Unstoppable, Amazon MGM Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 5, 2024

Unstoppable is only tangentially about wrestling. Here, the real core of the story of Anthony Robles, who was an impressive athlete in the sport in high school and college, is more about the multiple challenges he has to face to even find himself competing on the mat. By the time he gets there and the story goes through the motions of the young man's moves toward fighting for a pair of national championships, we're invested, not in how those matches will turn out, but in this character, whose fights go beyond any sporting competition.

The most obvious challenge for Anthony, played by a compelling Jharrel Jerome, is that he was born with one leg. That he wrestles competitively seems to be an accomplishment unto itself, but that our introduction to Anthony is of watching him win a national championship during his final year of high school tells us something more about him. From the start of director William Goldenberg's debut film, Anthony's disability does not define him or what he can accomplish.

It's everyone's assumptions about his physical condition that become the biggest barrier for him. In theory, Anthony should have multiple colleges and universities vying for him to become part of their wrestling squads, but only one school offers him an athletic scholarship. It's not even on Anthony's list of the ones he wants to attend, and as he works at an airport near his hometown of Mesa, Arizona, to help support his family and wait for responses to his college applications, none of his dream schools show any interest.

A talk with Shawn Charles (Don Cheadle), the coach at the state school in Tempe, gets at the reason behind it, if only because the coach offers broad ideas of how tough the college athletic system can be but never broaches the subject of Anthony only having one leg. Nobody wants to say that's the reason for him being overlooked, and in a way, the silence says it all.

Anthony persists, though, and while the screenplay—adapted from Robles' autobiography (with Austin Murphy) by screenwriters Eric Champnella, Alex Harris, and John Hindman—seems to be focused on the character's athletic ambitions, it establishes a deeper issue for Anthony to contend with almost immediately, too. That's the young man's home life with his supportive mother Judy (Jennifer Lopez) and his roughly dismissive stepfather Rick (Bobby Cannavale).

Judy believes in her son with everything she has to give, but Rick treats his stepson with a level of cruelty that he passes off as simple practicality. No one wants to say that Anthony's disability defines him, but Rick does—quite plainly and in that small, petty way that people with nothing to show for themselves do.

There's more to the stepfather, of course, as he leaves the house, his wife, and their four kids for long stretches of time, hints that he's ready to lay down the law of his home with violence if necessary, and eventually disappears, leaving Anthony with no real choice in his mind. He'll have to turn down the full-ride scholarship to an out-of-state school and hope for the best as a walk-on at the nearby state university, so that he can live at home and support his family as much as possible.

The balance of the narrative here is fascinating, because Goldenberg sets up what appears to be a routine sports story about an inspiring underdog, only to make it clear that what makes Anthony so inspiring has little to do with wrestling and maybe less to do with his disability. The young man has lived his entire life with one leg, so he knows exactly what it means for him, how other people will view and likely dismiss him, and that he must work harder than anyone else in order to overcome these challenges—less about his limitations and more about the limited thinking of what others believe he can accomplish.

Cheadle's coach is initially one of those folks, although Anthony proves him wrong time and again as the walk-on wrestler earns his spot on the team and, over the years at the school, the coach's respect as more than the team's star. The relationships here matter more to the filmmakers than the usual stuff of sports dramas, and indeed, wrestling almost seems to be a secondary concern to the film. That's to its benefit, because it means we get to watch relationships like Anthony's with Shawn evolve, the ones with his mother and high school coach Bobby Williams (Michael Peña) help him overcome his doubts, and the one with Rick, who returns home as a "changed" man, threaten to transform Anthony.

The story plays out, then, as much as a domestic drama as it does a sports tale, and the former bolsters the latter. When they come, Goldenberg doesn't need much help to amplify the intensity of the wrestling matches, which are shot in joint-wrenching close-ups and give a real sense of the strategy of the sport (The director spent his career as an editor, and it shows in these sequences). The film, though, understands that wrestling isn't the point. It's more the proof of how well everything around the sport is portrayed.

The wrestling in Unstoppable only means something because Anthony's story of overcoming physical and psychological obstacles in his personal life means more. This is a fine and genuinely inspiring tale—not because of anything obvious, such as Anthony's disability or the course of his wrestling career, but on account of watching a young man prove to everyone what he already knows about himself.

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