RATING- C
There are moments watching Bruised where it feels less like watching a movie and more like watching a series of tropes, cliches, and archetypes stacked so precariously on top of each other that its haphazard nature is almost, in itself, kind of impressive. A stiff breeze or hard thought would be all it takes to send the whole thing crashing down around itself, and yet even still the film has a certain familiar charm that makes it easy to watch without thinking about it too terribly hard.
This speaks more to the genre of sports film than it does to the movie itself. Like biopics, sports films have honed the familiar to such a degree that it’s increasingly difficult to find a place for originality. This is perhaps doubly true for boxing films. Sure you can, like Bruised, replace “boxing” with “MMA” and hope for the best, but the end result is still a hodgepodge of characters, scenes, and plots we’ve all seen countless times before.
There’s nothing in Bruised that you haven’t seen in any Rocky movie, save maybe for the fact that this narrative follows a woman. Beyond that, screenwriter Michelle Rosenfarb, making her debut as a screenwriter, hasn’t done much to try and change the formula so much as she leans into the idea that a formula exists in the first place. This is a movie that takes “checking boxes” as a challenge, seemingly endeavoring to tick as many of them as possible without bothering to explore those boxes at any meaningful level.
The film follows MMA fighter Jackie Justice (Halle Berry, who also makes her directorial debut), who has shunned the idea of fighting sense a disastrous bout several years ago. Following a brawl at an underground fight instigated by her boyfriend/manager, Desi (Adan Canto), she finds her will to enter the octagon once more. Complicating matters, however, is that the father of the son she abandoned has been murdered, and now Jackie must also learn how to be a mother while also training for a big come-back fight.
While the script is severely lacking, everyone else does a good job considering the material they have to work with. As director, Berry manages to capture a gritty intensity that suggests talents that are as yet untapped. She even does a good job with her double duty, even if the seeming 20-25-year age difference between actor and character does strain credulity.
Bruised also manages to be able to capture the cheap excitement offered by all tales of down-on-their-luck athletes. We got training montages, life obstacles, human drama, and everything else you might expect from this type of story. If you’re willing to ignore the cookie-cutter approach to telling it, it’s not without its charms. The problem is that it’s just so hard to ignore. You know this story’s ending before the movie even begins and the path it takes to get there is equally well to trod.
While nothing special, fans of sports movies and fighting movies will no doubt find something to appreciate with Bruised. It may not offer anything particularly meaningful in approach or execution, but it certainly does get the job done. Rocky this ain’t, but it does still manage to have its charms even with its many (many) flaws. At the very least, there are worse ways to spend your post-Thanksgiving dinner than sitting down with this film, which somehow manages to be equally kind of enjoyable and forgettable all at the same time.
Bruised is now available on Netflix.
