If acting were a branch of strength training then Orlando Bloom delivers a knockout performance in Sean Willis’s drama, The Cut. Playing a retired boxer given one more shot at the title, Bloom’s character undergoes a regime of workouts, diuretics and illegal drugs which leave him so weak that by the end of it he can barely stand on a set of scales to be weighed. You remember the training montage in the Rocky films where Rocky Balboa punches a beef carcass? Here, that’s the whole movie, only without Bill Conti’s inspirational score. The training is actually more brutal than the boxing.
The film begins formulaically enough: a decade ago Bloom’s boxer was forced from a championship bout when his eye opened up “like a Christmas present” in the sixth round. Now he mops the lavatories of the gym he co-owns with his partner, Caitlin (Caitríona Balfe) — eyes cast to the floor, a man cut off from the world by the weight of shame pressing down on him.
One day a flashy Don King-like promoter comes in with an offer. “People love a comeback story, always have,” he purrs and so it’s off to Las Vegas for one more shot at the title provided Bloom can “make weight” and drop from 13st 2lb to 11st in a week with the help of a sadistic trainer named Boz (John Turturro).
So far, so familiar: a boxer down on his luck is given one more shot at the title. Pass the bucket and sponge, please. But actually this is an original take. Where Willis’s film scores points is the relentlessness of its focus on the training inside Boz’s “all-inclusive torture factory” — including fully clothed saunas followed by scrape-downs of every last bead of sweat using credit cards or hairdryers, drugs that “cook your organs” and even an IV.
“You’ll spit your goddam soul out if you have to,” growls Turturro, who was clearly attracted to the role by the series of my-way-or-the-highway apophthegms his character gets to snarl (“There’s no rip cord on this ride”, “You’re nothing but a poker chip to me”) although it would be all the more impressive if the script didn’t sound make it all sound like the morning routine of the Tate brothers.
The prep for the film was almost as bad as that onscreen: Bloom lost 3st 7lb subsisting on tuna and cucumber, dealing with calorie deprivation, dehydration and insomnia before spiraling into anxiety and obsession. “I was a horrible person to be around,” Bloom says. He’s not that much nicer onscreen — gaunt and cussed, even in the film’s early stages, so void of lightness or humour that it’s hard to see how he maintained a relationship with Caitlin, a horribly underwritten part that consists mainly of Balfe looking extremely upset at the torture she sees her man inflicting on himself.
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“You’re girl loves you so she’s only going to hurt you,” Boz says and so Caitlin, too, is forced to peel off as Bloom’s boxer sheds all human attachment and the film turns into an arid examination of the soullessness required to be a winner. Or is it the film that is soulless? It’s hard to say.
Ever since Robert De Niro increased his weight from 10st to 15st to play Jake La Motta in Raging Bull, we have learnt to measure screen performances on a set of scales: the 3st 7lb Joaquin Phoenix lost for Joker, the 4st 2lb Chris Pratt lost for Guardians of the Galaxy, the 4st 5lb Christian Bale lost for The Machinist. But close your eyes and try to imagine an actor other than Bloom in the role and you realise how much these turns rely not on transformation but on the recognisability of the actor under all that blubber or inside that wiry frame. The poster might as well read “come see Orlando Bloom get put through the wringer”. It’s awesome on some level but it’s not much else.
★★★☆☆
15, 99min
Ethan Coen is back. After a creative parting of ways with his brother, Joel, who went off to make a beautiful but empty version of Macbeth, Ethan teamed up with his wife, Tricia Cooke, to make Drive-Away Dolls, a lesbians-on-the run caper starring Margaret Qualley that was as light and fun as a helium balloon. Now Coen has reunited with Cooke and Qualley again to write and direct Honey Don’t!, a comic neo-noir also about lesbians. This time its star is a lesbian private eye, Honey (Qualley), who has an impressive collection of dildos at her home in arid Bakersfield, California. She’s a private dick in every sense.
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Rocking a series of pretty dot-patterned dresses and high heels Qualley has as much fun with the role — hard-boiled, downbeat, deadpan — as she did with her fast-talking Jamie in Drive-Away Dolls, although Coen’s script doesn’t give her nearly as much to work with. A slender piping of plot involving a corrupt evangelist (Chris Evans) — yawn — is the least of the film’s debts to the exploitation flicks of early Eighties when all crimes were capers, all lesbians were lusty and the blood spattered like ketchup. Coen has gone back to his happy place but this time he’s not taken the audience with him.
★★☆☆☆
15, 89min
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