Michelle Rodriguez is a well-built high-school senior who discovers that she has a powerful punch and begins amateur training at a Brooklyn gym. Santiago Douglas is a a handsome young man, barely older than she, who also trains there. They meet after class, so to speak, and feel attracted to each other. No sex. Santiago has been instructed to save it for his next bout.
Both are participants in a "gender-blind" athletic program that makes no distinctions between males and females, a misguided attempt to level the athletic playing field.
A conservative radio commentator recently announced -- and I swear I'm not making this up -- "Let's face it; the president is black." I'm here to make an equally perspicacious observation -- "Men and women are different." Now, in 99 cases out of 100, this needn't make any difference in physical performance. But in the top one percent -- trained athletes whose skills have been honed to a fine edge -- men generally have the advantage. With their narrow hips they can run faster. And they have greater muscle mass and upper torso strength. These differences in body build make it possible for women to give birth and raise children and for men to catch and kill food for them. This sexual bifurcation is the result of the perfectly normal process of natural selection. Without it, there might not be any humans at all. And that, boys and girls, is why they have men's events and women's events at the Olympics. I speak to you as your anthropologist. That will be ten cents, PayPal preferred.
That's why I called this gender-blind program misguided. As talented a boxer as Rodrigues is, as she approaches the zenith of the game, she will eventually lose to a male.
That's where the complication arises in this movie. Rodrigues is finally matched against her boy friend, Douglas. Neither wants to loose any anger on the other, not to mention roundhouse rights, but the pride of both is at stake, and the pride is both personal and gender related. Douglas refuses to fight a woman in the ring. And Rodriguez is offended by what she sees as his patronizing attitude. It ends happily.
I wasn't really expecting much from the film. I thought it would be a rip off of Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" until I discovered that this was released years earlier. And I'd never heard of the director or of any of the performers. That sort of obscurity generally augers ill -- made-for-television weepers and so forth.
But I was surprised at how neatly this is put together. The total absence of bathos left me open mouthed. So did the minimal use of boxing clichés -- the frayed ropes, the blood, the cutting of the swollen eye, the battered post-bout faces, the fat and sweaty onlooker shouting "Kill him!", the slow motion landing of glove on nose, the spray of sweat from the mauled head, the heroic music signaling the long-awaited apotheosis of the victor. None of that here -- well, almost none. The whole plot could be considered formulaic. Tough kid finds outlet in the ring, etc.
The feeling you're left with is that this is probably pretty much what these amateur contests are like. Different from those we see on TV and in ordinary movies. No bells ring, for instance, Instead a dancing and observant referee yells "Stop!" And "Box!" The contestants wear head gear. The gym is populated not by a crowd of cheering spectators, but only by a handful of people who have some particular interest in the goings on. It's a clean movie, despite the rather grim setting and the unhappy family dynamics.
Michelle Rodriguez can look pretty mean, what with her muscular bulk and her eyes glowing under her lowered brow, but once you get used to the idea that this is a girl who can beat you to a pulp anytime she wants, and once you hear the feminine contours of her supersegmentals, she ain't bad. (A scene in which she battles her father to the floor is overdoing it.) It was a little hard to understand Douglas's restraint when Rodriguez crawls all over him in bed. The director, Karyn Kusama, has chosen her talent carefully.
Shows what you can do with some talent, imagination, and a modicum of money. There ought to be more films like it. Take one of those multi-billion dollar blockbusters full of dinosaurs or space ships and spread the generosity around a little.

Watching a videotaped replay of about 8 various 1994-1997 Spider-man cartoons made me realize why I couldn't stomach it when it first came out.
I'm from the old school, where the 1967 Spider-man cartoon was the best and still remains the best. (I won't get into the psychedelic version which is terrible - give me traditional villains please.)
The acting in the new stuff is lousy, read off a sheet with either no feeling or overacting. Paul Soles, where are you now? This guy was the best at voice acting for Spider-man. No one comes close. Watching Secret Wars, a great idea for a cartoon mini-series, made me wince. Dr. Doom sounds like a comedy version of Bela Lugosi. In a scene with Red Skull and Doc Ock, Red Skull has no German accent while Ock is heavy Russian! The old Marvel comic hero series from 1966 had much better voice acting. Iron Man sounded like he was wearing an iron mask, Captain America sounded authoritative not like some teenage kid. Paul Frees as the Thing in the 60s was the best Thing ever. The old voice actors were pioneers and there will never be anyone like them. Ever hear Mel Blanc's son? No way can he replicate his dad.
The animation is clunky. Okay, so they have all the fancy character shadings and nicely painted backrounds. Sometimes you can say more with less movement if more movement looks bad. Sometimes when you let the computer take over the movements they become robotic. I really don't think any of these animators know what in betweeners are.
The stories are badly written, and some of the lines they give the heroes are horrible. Why, for example, when heroes are teamed together for the first time they start fighting with each other? In Secret Wars, it was a lame excuse that got them in disagreement. I can see if the hero was dark, unknown and mysterious - like the Punisher, but why the Thing and Iron Man can't hold their tempers with each other is ridiculous, then the Torch joins in. This is just another of the later comic trends to get heroes to square off at each other for a few seconds because 'everyone' wants to see that stuff. Give them a better reason to fight and maybe it can be pulled off, but "Hey what are you doing here" and "You don't tell me what to do" are LAME reasons. Another badly written scene is in The Wedding where Harry Osborne unmasks himself to spoil Peter's wedding. That whole scenario was awful.
Last, but certainly not least, is what another critic calls Juvenile Violence - meaning no punches at all. In Secret Wars, the Lizard carefully ducked the Thing's charge. But the Thing punches the bad guys across an entire block in the comics. He must simply revert to lifting heavy things and subduing a bad guy by grabbing hold of him in the cartoons. Sure, these cartoons were not made strictly for us adults but for kids under 12. That's why they can't have punching, because mommy and daddy don't believe in that type of violence. But you can blow things up, these cartoons will include that. As a kid before political correctness came in fashion I saw cartoons punching each other. What's wrong with a punch to the chops? Is there really less violence in the world today because those slick and crafty new cartoons took out the punch? I find this the most insulting of all when I watch the new stuff. They've written out "the punch' because we could all hurt ourselves.
Kids, enjoy these cartoons all you want, I've seen enough.
3/10 rating