Movie Review: They Fight

It's been a minute since I've seen a movie that feels as incomplete as They Fight. This fact-based sports drama about a recently paroled boxing coach (André Holland) in Washington DC who slowly rediscovers his passion for the sport that defined his life before drugs took him down a dark path after he crosses paths with a community center manager (Wendell Pierce) who introduces him to a couple of kids from the neighborhood (Anthony B. Jenkins, Toissant Francois Battiste) who show real potential as fighters progresses in such an awkward manner that it feels like you're watching a scratched DVD that is skipping multiple chapters between scenes. Characters who appear to be pivotal players in the story during the early going just disappear without explanation. Arcs for both the adult and child characters are assembled with so little detail that it's pretty much impossible to have any emotional reaction besides confusion or indifference. Even the boxing elements kind of feel like an afterthought as only about a third of the far too short 95-minute runtime is actually dedicated to the sweet science. While They Fight isn't aspiring to be some epic boxing movie a la the Rocky sequels, it also shouldn't feel like the filmmakers ran out of money after they shot 60-65% of the script and had to frantically assemble a final cut from the footage they were able to get.

The clumsy, rushed nature of They Fight became more shocking when the end credits sequence arrived and I discovered that the co-writer of the film Andrew Renzi directed a documentary about the people depicted in it! How the hell could somebody that got to know the real people who these characters are based on do such a terrible job of translating a story he's already told on screen into a dramatized narrative? The raw skeleton of this story is a compelling one that could easily become an effective sports biopic and yet, Renzi and co-writer/director Sheldon Candis managed to turn that solid seed of an idea into something that's sloppy to the point where it borders on being amateurish. There's absolutely no excuse for turning in a poor effort that leaves your solid cast who all turn in earnest performances out to dry because you couldn't be bothered to tell this story in a manner that wasn't fragmented, soulless and dull. As rude as this is to say, I believe that They Fight deserves its fate of being buried in the depths of a streaming library and I fully expect it to go down as one of the weakest movies I watch this year.

Grade: D+