UPPERCUT - Mark Reviews Movies

Uppercut, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | February 27, 2025

It's not just that the story of Uppercut, about an aspiring boxer who later becomes a manager, is thin. Writer/director Torsten Ruether's movie, a remake of his previous one (apparently not released in the United States), is so set on its narrative gimmick that the story is often incoherent.

This is relatively simple stuff, too. The central character is Toni (Luiii), whom we see at two very different points in her life. In the present day, she's backstage at a big bout between her fighter Payne (Jordan E. Cooper) and a tough opponent. As he heads into the ring, the story flashes back eight years prior, when Toni was a scrappy young woman with dreams of pugilistic glory, a criminal record, and no one taking her ambitions seriously.

In theory and in practice, the core of this tale is the relationship that develops between Toni and a long-time boxing trainer named Elliott (Ving Rhames), whose own boxing career was cut short by a cheap blow but who has sprung back to coach some impressive fighters with fine careers of their own. Toni goes into his gym on an apparent whim, after having an argument with her perpetually unseen boyfriend, and is pleasantly surprised to find herself in the presence of greatness. She decides to take advantage of it and ask Elliott to train her.

This is, again, a very basic story, which is complicated and becomes convoluted by Ruether's decision to repeatedly take us out of the gym and the past, only to jump to that present-day fight and sporadic scenes of Toni meeting and agreeing to manage Payne at some point in between the two plot lines. Then again, to call the fight itself a plot is giving it far too much credit. Those scenes amount to Toni staying in some cramped room behind the scenes, listening as ringside commentators doubt Payne and criticize her habit of not standing in her boxer's corner, and becomes increasingly frustrated by the whole situation.

Beyond how uneventful about half of the movie actually is, there are bigger questions to consider about the structure of Ruether's script. Why is there such a gap between the two main story threads? Why does the filmmaker fail to give us any sense of how Toni went from an aspiring boxer to a successful but controversial manager of fighters? What actual, tangible connection is there between the advice Elliott offers in the past and Toni's current challenge of sitting around while Payne has the fight of his career?

The movie doesn't provide any answers, because it seem to have an idea as to what they might be. It genuinely feels as if an entire section of the screenplay is missing or wasn't filmed, and maybe that's why Ruether appears to break his premise of showing Toni on two different nights of her life, simply to explain how she and Payne met. That's the least of the holes in the narrative, especially since the boxer only exists in the main parts of this story in the backdrop.

With an entire plotline pretty much useless as drama or in establishing character and theme, there are, at least, the scenes between Toni and Elliott to keep us occupied. Rhames is such a reliable actor and sturdy on-screen presence that he gives some degree of gravitas to a character who's essentially a walking, talking cliché machine.

Elliott gives Toni advice about fighting and life, and would it surprise anyone to discover that his advice for one often applies to the other? He comes up with little training exercises, such as dodging tennis balls and encouraging Toni to show him her dance moves (Has anyone danced to jazz in this particular way in the history of movement?). Meanwhile, Toni gives him some sense of her tough life of dating a wealthy guy, being paraded around at various parties, and not having her dream of becoming a boxer be acknowledged. The dialogue is often stilted or awkwardly constructed, and while it's probably not fair to criticize Luiii's thick German accent (Her performance is fine otherwise, and the unconvincing bits come from the character being so), it certainly doesn't help in making us believe that the screenplay reflects a sense of how any ordinary people might talk to each other.

Uppercut almost seems to go out of its way to make as little sense as it does. It's a foundational failure of storytelling, but even the material that functions on that basic level is hackneyed hokum.

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