Review: Christy

David Michôd’s Christy is a film that knows how to take a punch but not always how to throw one. It’s bruising, heartfelt, and at times formulaic, a story of triumph and trauma that can’t quite balance its fighter’s grit with the genre’s glossier instincts. What saves it, over and over again, is Sydney Sweeney. Her performance as Christy Martin, the first female boxer to become a household name in America, is commanding and raw, that she almost wills the film into transcendence. Even when Christy stumbles through the usual biopic rhythms, Sweeney refuses to let it go down easy.

When we first meet Christy, it’s 1989 and she’s a scrappy twenty-year-old swinging her way through tiny fights in West Virginia, desperate for a way out. Her parents (Ethan Embry and Merritt Wever) don’t take her seriously; her mother, especially, regards boxing as both unladylike and ungodly, her daughter’s rumored queerness an additional affront. Then Christy meets Jim Martin (Ben Foster), a trainer and promoter who promises her a shot at legitimacy. He gives her a new image, pink shorts, pink gloves, a slogan-ready persona, and makes her famous. He also isolates her, manipulates her, and beats her into submission.

Michôd captures this transformation with a grim efficiency. The fights are secondary to the real battle unfolding in the Martins’ home, a place of power games and bruised silences. Foster is chillingly good as Jim, playing him as a man so insecure he needs to control everything around him, yet charming enough to pass for supportive to the outside world. But it’s Sweeney who makes the abuse bearable to watch, precisely because she refuses to let Christy be reduced to victimhood. There’s fire in her stillness, rage flickering behind every forced smile. In scenes that could’ve played as pitying, Sweeney finds defiance instead, she’s a woman trying to stay alive by whatever means the world allows her.

And yet, the film surrounding her can feel frustratingly routine. Michôd’s direction is sturdy but occasionally shapeless, especially in the middle stretch, when the story hits the expected sports-movie beats: the montage of wins, the media rise, the celebrity endorsements. We’ve seen this arc before, the underdog overcoming doubters, the training sequences set to propulsive music, but Christy doesn’t find much new to say about it. The film’s focus wavers between her professional ascent and her deteriorating personal life, rarely finding the connective tissue that could make both feel essential.

Still, when Christy works, it lands hard. The final act is where everything coalesces, the physical brutality, the emotional exhaustion, the quiet will to survive. Michôd stages Christy’s last confrontation with Jim not as a Hollywood catharsis but as something closer to reclamation. It’s violent and messy, but also unshakably honest. By the time Sweeney delivers her last line, bruised, trembling, and still somehow standing, it’s as though the film has burned away its own artifice.

Supporting performances deepen the impact. Wever’s turn as Christy’s rigidly moralistic mother adds a layer of generational cruelty, while Foster’s portrayal of Jim is disturbingly human, never cartoonish. Chad L. Coleman’s broad but funny take on Don King injects bursts of absurdity that keep the film from collapsing under its own weight. But when the dust settles, there’s no question that Christy belongs to Sweeney. She’s ferocious and wounded, embodying a woman who learned to turn pain into motion.

For all its missteps, the sagging second act, the genre clichés, the lack of perspective beyond Christy’s orbit, Christy ends on a high note that’s both devastating and oddly uplifting. It’s less a sports film than a survival story, one defined by a performance so fierce it eclipses the film around it. And in that final act, for one bloody, defiant moment, Christy finally hits with full force.

3.5/5