‘Christy’ Turns the Story of a Groundbreaking Fighter into an Average Boxing Flick

Boxing stories have an unfortunate tendency to blend together, especially when they’re based on real people. While Rocky Balboa can take on the whole USSR, the recent spate of boxing movies feels like they’re only interesting to people who remembered the events contemporaneously. Not every story is going to be on the level of Muhammad Ali, where the fighter is such a towering figure that you would understand him even if you had never watched a boxing match. But for movies like Hands of Stone, Bleed for This, and now Christy, it feels like we’re in the deep cuts of boxing history where the filmmakers are trying to find a distinctive angle only to return to your standard rise-fall-redemption arc. Christy could upend this trend thanks to the contours of Christy Martin’s story, but director and co-writer David Michôd bloats the film with redundancies and montages rather than making the lean, mean picture his subject deserves.

Christy Martin (Sydney Sweeney), a coal miner’s daughter from West Virginia, put women’s boxing on the map. The movie charts her rise starting in the late 80s and her fateful relationship with trainer and then husband, Jim Martin (Ben Foster). The movie leans into the juxtaposition of Martin as a fierce fighter in the ring, but outside, she’s insulted by her mother (Merritt Weaver) and then abused by Martin. Despite the professional success Martin receives, her husband’s jealousy and her internalized homophobia and self-loathing begin to chip away at everything she’s built.

I understand that Michôd and co-writer Mirrah Foulkes are eager to keep Martin as the focal point of the story, but they should have found a way to bring the layperson into the larger boxing world. What was women’s boxing before Martin? Was all it took to make her a star a loose relationship between her husband and Don King (Chad L. Coleman)? The film puts in plenty of time to providing personal context for Martin, but we’re hearing this story because of her professional success. If we don’t grasp what Martin is up against beyond “There are no famous women boxers,” then no amount of training montages or boxing matches will help illuminate why she’s an impressive athlete.

Instead, the film focuses on the idea that a woman who was so physically dominating in the ring could still be a victim of domestic abuse. That’s an important story to tell, and the movie does a great job of explaining the psychological damage done by Martin’s mother to lay the groundwork for a predator like Jim to further control and belittle Christy. Furthermore, it demonstrates how Christy, a gay woman, could internalize homophobia and spew venom at a lesbian boxer like Lisa Holewyne (Katy O’Brian). We’re always tracking along with Christy’s emotional journey, and that does lead to some narrative payoff even if we can’t always appreciate her athletic career.

However, there’s a slight mismatch at the center of the movie, with Sweeney never feeling like she carries the age of the character. It’s a story that begins in the late 80s and then carries us all the way to 2012, but Sweeney always keeps her youthful glow; only the wigs change. Part of that is a makeup problem and not appropriately aging her with the character, but Sweeney also has difficulty playing an older woman. It’s one thing to play a hardscrabble woman who will curse out a man in court, but I always knew I was watching an actor in her 20s. It feels like Christy’s hairstyles have been on a journey, but not the person.

For a film that runs over two hours, it’s tough to say it provides a better understanding of Martin than what we get from her own words in the 2021 documentary Untold: Deal with the Devil. The aspects of the story that are unique to Martin—her sexuality, suffering from domestic abuse, and being a groundbreaking professional athlete—only work in fits and spurts. Martin is an athlete worthy of a biopic, but Christy can’t help but resort to the old, familiar combos, and those staid plot beats end up overshadowing what could have been a knockout sports drama.