Prizefighter – A Review

The history of boxing is long. The history of boxing movies is also long. Prizefighter, a new mostly bare knuckle film now available on Amazon Prime, takes us to the turn of 1800s England. Boxers crack their unprotected finger bones on each others’ skulls while wearing tights. Matt Hookings plays one of those boxers, Jem Belcher, the real life fighter who became British champion at just 19 years old. Hookings also wrote the script for the film and navigated the film’s production through countless financial hurdles, unpaid crew, and switching from Wales to Malta to Lithuania to finish shooting

Sylvester Stallone famously would not sell his script for Rocky unless he got to play the title role. The same with Hookings and this film. Rocky succeeded thanks to its characterization. Rocky has pet turtles, he reluctantly breaks people’s thumbs, he’s got a crush on the shy girl at the pet store. Stallone gives an odd, loveable performance. We like Rocky. All we know about Hookings’ Belcher is that he kind of loves his mom and has a boozing, philandering grandpa (a former boxer by the name of Jack Slack played by Russell Crowe). There’s not much to go on. It’s hard to tell if Hookings’ performance is going for wide-eyed innocence or it’s just the actor’s woodenness.

Although some British reviewers have pointed out the ridiculousness of Crowe’s accent, I couldn’t tell at all and thoroughly enjoyed him in all his beefy glory. After an opening boxing scene in 1805, the film takes us back to Bristol 1789. A young Jem watches his grandpa Jack club men with his fists and drink profusely. Jem’s mother (played by Jodhi May) fears her father’s influence on her boy. Crowe plays a loveable rogue until a very abrupt turn into a possibly incestuous villain. After a few tiny coughs in bed, the old man dies just as quickly as that change in character. A now adult Jem takes up his grandfather’s boxing legacy to the chagrin of his mother.

Sadness and worry are pretty much the only emotions Jem’s mom gets to play. I’d say that’s unfair to her character but it’s par for the course. No one has any depth, especially Jem. Things just happen to him. There’s no build up to when he first becomes British champion after a gruelling battle. Scenes never breathe or resemble real human emotion. The story seems to want to jump from life event to life event to get them out of the way.

Jem becomes a boozer like his grandpa. He even looks in the mirror and literally sees Russell Crowe’s laughing face in the reflection. The drunkenness takes over. He ends up in jail with a mystical cellmate played by famous experimental theatre performer Steven Berkoff. He tells Jem about wombs and darkness and self-hatred. The fight scenes clearly show the accumulation of physical punishment on the boxer’s faces. Despite all the hell Jem puts himself through, no discernible change happens in him.

That said, there are some great sequences including Jem clowning another fighter in front of a small group of aristocrats. The mixture of brutality and period costumes is very fun. Since it doesn’t want to explore its characters, the film could have leaned into its more bizarre choices. For example, a drunken mansion orgy gets interrupted for Jem and his suspicious manager to have a game of handball right in the middle of all the sex.

The Rocky franchise’s runtimes became increasingly dominated by montages to the point that Rocky IV is over 30% montage. Jem’s rise and fall is handled clumsily but the movie finds itself when it embraces the fun of a montage with its requisite unorthodox training techniques. In the land of jellied eels it makes beautiful sense that a boxer would toughen his midsection by taking electric eel shocks to the ribs.

Despite its flaws, I started thinking back fondly to this movie in the days after watching it. Hookings himself is the son of Welsh boxing champion David Pearch who sadly died at 41, most likely in part due to injuries sustained in the ring. There’s a lot to like about the movie and Hookings showed insane determination to get it made. Early on in the film, Crowe’s character tells Jem “Violence is as much about taking pain as inflicting it.” Hookings went the distance, he got the movie made, but I hope he picks himself up and remakes this film. I don’t know how. But that would make a great story.

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