‘Christy’ Review: Sydney Sweeney Breaks Type In Paint By Numbers Boxing Biopic

The Christy Martin biopic allows Sydney Sweeney to step out of her comfort zone, but sadly doesn’t take the time to get under the boxer’s skin. Who is Christy Martin? David Michôd’s biopic never gets past the basic facts of the sporting icon whose career was overshadowed by her husband’s violence.

Christy (Sydney Sweeney) gets plucked out of college basketball and becomes a women’s boxing pioneer after entering a local contest. Her natural gift for delivering a straight right punch helps her get snapped up by Tennessee promoter Larry (Bill Kelly).

Christy’s teenage years are not the easiest, mainly because of her parents, John (Ethan Embry) and Joyce (Merritt Wever). While they don’t love the idea that their feisty daughter is pursuing a violent sport, they hope it may distract her from her girlfriend Rosie (Jess Gabor). 

The opening act of Christy breezes through her early success as she soon becomes a welterweight champion. The film pushes her from teenage rebel to leading name in the sport a little too quickly. Unfortunately, the film relies on the cliché sports montage to push the plot forward. The loud soundtrack and lack of development make it hard to feel anything for the young boxer. It’s hard to root for someone who always feels strange.

The film is less concerned with her sporting achievements and more with her relationship with training Jim Martin (Ben Foster). Martin is initially dismissive of “lady boxers” and purposefully makes her spar with a man in the hopes of making her feel bad. Instead, she knocks a male sparring partner to the floor and forces him to reconsider his views on women in the ring.

The two have barely met, and he’s proposing to her. There is almost no development in their relationship. He goes from dismissive trainer to lover to a controlling husband, and there is no evidence that she goes along with it out of love or because she is fearful of her career. There is too much subtlety to their domestic abuse scenes, with his violent dig turning jumping into abuse without much evolution in between.

Christy struggles with tone, not knowing how to mix scenes of her in the ring and her volatile relationship with her thuggish husband. There is whiplash between the happy and the sad, which makes it seem like the bad is being underplayed. The darker themes that take over this story are subdued and lack the subtle hand required.

Christy doesn’t quite understand how to portray her complicated relationship with gender and sexuality. Her teenage relationship with a woman is shoved aside in favor of her marriage to Jim. Her internalised homophobia manifests itself as cocky digs in the ring to the other women. One of the most interesting parts of Cristy’s life is reduced to trash-talking.

Christy suffers from many of the common problems of a sports biopic. They struggle to fully cram everything into two hours. Her queerness, which is a huge part of her story, is pushed aside, as is much of her success in the ring. Although it does a better job than The Smashing Machine at balancing her professional and personal life, there is a sense that some parts are sped past too quickly, and others linger and become repetitive. 

Sydney Sweeney showcases her skill in her most serious role to date. Famous for her role in Euphoria, Sweeney has been working hard to drop her teen drama label and work on a range of different projects, from horror (Immaculate) to romance (Anyone But You). The actress trained extensively for the role, and her physicality in the ring is very noticeable. While she can handle the role’s physical demands, she can’t always handle the emotional. Towards the end of the film, when the writing requires a lot of nuances from the actress, she doesn’t always manage to land the emotional punch.

The lack of nuance in her character is not entirely down to Sweeney. The writing (David Michôd wrote the script with Mirrah Foulkes from a story by Katherine Fugate) is frequently uneven, and never quite understands its leading lady. She spends her life concussing women in the ring and correcting reports that she is not a feminist and instead refers to herself as a wife and homemaker. Her rejection of her status as a pioneering woman in sport is more complicated than the film has time to explore.

Christy’s secret weapon is Merritt Weaver as Joyce. Christy’s mother is cold and more worried about the views of others than her daughter’s own well-being. Her speech in the final is more shocking and chilling than any knockout in the ring. Another scene-stealing performance is Chad Coleman as Don King. While it feels more like an SNL sketch than a performance worthy of a biopic like this, it’s what King would have wanted. 

Ben Foster (and a terrible wig) does a decent job as the instantly slimy Jim, although anyone who has seen his previous work (Hell or High Water, Lone Survivor) will notice he is holding back here. Katy O’Brian is also doing great work here, a friend and sparring partner, Lisa Holewyne. O’Brian is effortlessly likable, slightly overshadowing Sweeney whenever the duo is together.

At 135 minutes long, the gut-punch moment comes too late to have consequences. The last 20 minutes of the film rush through too many plot points, making the should-be emotional beats strangely unaffecting. The film ends just as it starts getting interesting.

Christy is a disappointing paint-by-numbers biopic of a pioneering woman who came from a West Virginia mining family to become one of the most extraordinary women in the ring. She was Don King’s first female star until her husband made her career come crashing down, but the writing fails to balance this story. Without her, women’s ring sports may not be at the level they are currently at, but the story is too concerned with her husband’s anger issues. For a movie about a great woman, it ends in a strange place that puts a man too much at the forefront of the story.

Grade: C

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