{"id":263902,"date":"2025-11-05T18:48:26","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T18:48:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/263902\/"},"modified":"2025-11-05T18:48:26","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T18:48:26","slug":"sydney-sweeney-hits-hard-in-boxing-biopic-christy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/263902\/","title":{"rendered":"Sydney Sweeney Hits Hard In Boxing Biopic CHRISTY"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Sydney<\/a> <\/p>\n

As the female boxer who put the sport on the map, Christy Martin\u2019s story would always be worthy of being told. But the boxing drama, a staple of Hollywood sports movies, has nearly always been framed by male fighters clawing their way to a championship, overcoming personal demons and family troubles to do it. David Mich\u00f4d\u2019s brutally dark but also crowd-pleasing\u00a0Christy\u00a0could never follow such a cliche path, because the female journey in a sport dominated by violent men could never be such a thing. It\u2019s a physical, transformative role for star Sydney Sweeney who, let\u2019s be honest, has had a couple of duds over the last few months, but she rebounds here in a film that asks her to be tough, vulnerable, and a harder hitter than any man who dared step in her way.<\/p>\n

Christy Salters (Sweeney) was already a slugger before she ever laced up the gloves as a professional fighter. She was winning Toughman competitions for money and to help get out her aggression, fueled by stifling conservative parents (played by an infuriating Merritt Wever and Ethan Embry) who refuse to accept their daughter\u2019s homosexuality. Instead, they drive her girlfriend Rosie (Jess Gabor) away, and force Christy to pretend to be something that she\u2019s not. This would become a trend for her, pretending to be one thing to please someone else.<\/p>\n

The worst example of Christy hiding her true self comes when she meets weak, pathetic boxing trainer Jim Martin, played by a typically hammy Ben Foster. Jim doesn\u2019t think women\u2019s boxing has a future and tries to brush Christy aside until he sees her talent\u2026and that there\u2019s money to make with her. And she, in turn, dresses herself up in pink and hitches her life and career to him, because boxing is the one thing she is great at, and Jim says he\u2019s the guy who can make her the best. So she becomes his wife even though it\u2019s not her truest self, and leads that disguised life for years as she battles her way to becoming the highest-paid female boxer in the world.<\/p>\n

Christy\u00a0is never a movie about Martin\u2019s quest for gold, it\u2019s about an entirely different kind of fight. While there are aspects of your typical boxing drama, the high of being the best and the inevitable taste of defeat, that stuff\u2019s just in the first hour. The real fight happens later, when Christy has to fight off abuses at home, the dismissive attitude of her family at times of need, and the risk of getting screwed by shady promoters like Don King (played impressively by Chad L. Coleman).<\/p>\n

The big wins in\u00a0Christy\u00a0don\u2019t happen in the ring, nor do her biggest losses. Spanning from 1989 all the way to 2010, the film covers a lot of ground, and Sweeney, who packed on 30+ lbs of muscle for the role, delivers a career-best performance, capturing Martin\u2019s swagger that made her a great trailblazer for the sport. We also see another strong performance from Katy O\u2019Brian as Lisa Holewyne, Christy\u2019s one-time rival-turned-frenemy, and much later, her wife. O\u2019Brian showed how she could be both intimidating and sensitive in\u00a0Love Lies Bleeding\u00a0and some of that can be found here, as well.\u00a0 Foster has stumbled into overacting of late (as he does in\u00a0Motor City, also here at TIFF), but his being a ham works here because Jim is such a sad, pitiful loser that he always needs to be the center of\u00a0 attention. Jim is a fragile loser, but even losers can be dangerous.<\/p>\n

Mich\u00f4d\u2019s best known for his grim Aussie thrillers such as\u00a0Animal Kingdom\u00a0and\u00a0The Rover, and while Martin\u2019s story is ultimately one of triumph, it spirals down really dark territory, culminating in a shocking act of violence that is tough to watch unfold. Again, the worst things that happen to Martin aren\u2019t in the ring. The actual in-ring action is exciting, quick, bloody, no-frills stuff and Sweeney acclimates herself well to it.<\/p>\n

Christy\u00a0doesn\u2019t try to convince us that its subject is an angel. She\u2019s imperfect, a bit of an a-hole, but by the end of the movie there\u2019s some acknowledgement of the mistakes she\u2019s made on her journey to the top. For Sweeney, the buzz has been that this is the role that will get some awards attention. We\u2019ll see about that. She\u2019s definitely put in the work to make Christy Martin someone we want to see score a knockout against those who would keep her down on the mat. Martin\u2019s story doesn\u2019t fit the mold of your usual boxing drama, and the best thing about\u00a0Christy\u00a0is that it never tries to.<\/p>\n

Black Bear<\/a> will release\u00a0Christy\u00a0in theaters on November 7th.<\/p>\n

*NOTE: This review was originally part of our TIFF 2025 coverage.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the female boxer who put the sport on the map, Christy Martin\u2019s story would always be worthy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":263903,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[447],"tags":[703,49,48,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-263902","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-boxing","8":"tag-boxing","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263902\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/263903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}