Fighting with My Family Review

I've mentioned in most of my reviews recently that it's been an interesting year so far. The box office has suffered quite a bit and the quality of movies hasn't quite been up to par, which is why I was hoping to end the month of February on a positive note with this little wrestling movie that had positive buzz coming out of Sundance last month capped off with excellent reviews from normal critics and film fans alike. Given that I'm a big fan of sports, I always love myself a good sports movie. Thus when one comes around with positive buzz following it, it doesn't take much convincing to get me on board. I will say that wrestling is not really my forte as far as sports that I like to watch, especially when you get to the WWE. I want to make sure I use the appropriate f-word here because calling it "fake" really upsets pro wrestling fans, even though that's often what I've called it for most of my life. But "fixed" is the appropriate term here that they prefer in the movie, so I'll go with that and say that I have a hard time watching sports where the outcome is fixed. It's just not that fun watching people pretend to get hurt and fall down, then be perfectly fine 30 seconds later, as it's all just a show that requires more acting skills than it does actual wrestling ability. Take that for what it's worth.

Thus I can say I'm a sports fan, but I'm not really a wrestling fan. So if you think you need to be a wrestling fan in order to enjoy this movie, I'd say that's not true. But even when it comes to sports movies, I can often be a little overly critical because there's only a few possible outcomes that a sports movie can have. For example, when you watch a movie about a football team, you can almost guarantee that said team is going to the title game and either miraculously winning or losing the game while learning a positive lesson. You usually don't get a movie about a team who went 8-8 or even had a losing record because those aren't stories worth turning into movies. It's only the incredible and miraculous stories that get turned into movies. Thus when you know the end of the story before you start the movie, you're going down a tricky path because it's all about the execution of the journey itself. Oftentimes the fun of a movie is not knowing how it's all going to turn out. With that element of surprise gone, it better be a dang good journey in getting there. When it comes to "Fighting with My Family," this is a true story about Paige, a two-time WWE Diva champion. That sentence there puts a lot of pressure on the journey of the movie itself to succeed, knowing the final result.

Granted, I didn't know exactly how the movie was going to end. I didn't know if the final scene was going to be her winning her first title or if she was going to lose the actual match, but be accepted into the WWE community with the end credits telling us what she went onto win. But it was going to be one of those two. Thus our options were this movie being like "Rocky" or "Rocky II." Because, well, spoiler alert, Rocky loses to Apollo Creed in "Rocky," but gets his revenge and wins in "Rocky II." That means that "Fighting with My Family" had a disadvantage going in. Not helping its cause is that the trailers had to tell us a bit more story than your average sports movie in order to actually get people in seats, thus I knew the whole first act of the film. If you haven't seen any trailers and want to be surprised, feel free to close this review right now and go see it because I'm about to spoil said first act as well because that's a requirement to properly explaining why this movie works so well. The drama there comes with the title of the movie being a two-part title. First, her father and mother were both wrestlers while her and her brother are aspiring wrestlers. Second, she makes it into a tryout for the WWE while her brother doesn't, which provides a lot of contention with the family.

Yes, sure, there's some fun wrestling sequences in this movie, but it's that family dynamic that makes this movie work. Both of the kids have a dream and they both want to do it together, but it sparks a lot of jealousy with the brother when his sister makes the cut and he doesn't. He feels that he's been working hard at this his whole life and has a stronger desire, but he has to sit back home while his sister gets to go to America. When she gets there, she feels lost and alone, so she wants to call her brother for help and support, but he's too busy being angry and jealous, thus he won't even talk to her. Then she has to question if this is really the dream she wants or if its her parents' dream that she's falling because this is a much different ball game, so to speak, than she was expecting. This is where the movie gives you a level of respect for the WWE that you may not have had otherwise. If you are going to put on a show, you need to know how to put on a show. This requires the correct personality, the ability to win over the audience, and the proper athleticism. Sure, you can say this is fixed, but it still requires one to be in top notch shape, so there's a lot of obstacles that Paige has to overcome and she doesn't know if she has the heart or the spirit in order to succeed.

Because of this, I really felt for her. I bought into her journey. And the movie did a great job of not making it an easy one. As I said before, I knew that she would eventually succeed. But I had no idea how she was going to do it. Along this journey, there were a lot of moments that made me cringe. And I mean that in a good way. For those of you who saw last year's "Eighth Grade," this made me cringe in the way that it did when Elsie Fisher's character went to that pool party. It was tough to watch, but doing so properly built up the emotion of the film, making for a more rewarding climax. That's the same story here. There's a lot of decisions that Paige makes in this movie that made me cower in my chair. In retrospect, I'm glad she made them because it showed the difficulty that she experienced in trying to transition from wrestling with her family in the U.K. to trying out for the WWE in America. If the movie would've made this look like an easy transition or breezed over it really quickly, it would've compromised the experience and made the finale less satisfying. So major props to the writers of this film for coming up with a really good script that was able to sell me on the emotion of the journey, making it was more than just your typical underdog sports movie.

Along these lines, I made a strong connection here to "Rocky" and "Creed." Both of those movies are boxing movies. But it's not the boxing that's front and center. Perhaps some of the sequels get into that, but in the original "Rocky" and "Creed," it's all about the character development and figuring out who you are as a human being. There was even a pretty sweet training montage in "Fighting with My Family" once everything connected with Paige that reminded me of "Rocky" and "Creed." Helping boost the excellent script of the movie was our performance by Florence Pugh as Paige. I hear she looks and acts a lot like the real Paige, so props for that, but most of all I give her props for giving an excellent lead performance. I was invested in her story for the very beginning and that's because Florence Pugh did such a great job of making me care for her. Just like you need a Sylvester Stallone or a Michael B. Jordan for a "Rocky" or "Creed" movie to truly work, this movie needed a strong lead character to pull this off and Florence Pugh perfectly steps into that role. She also had a lot of great help around her, especially with Jack Lowden as the brother, Nick Frost and Lena Headey as the parents, and Vince Vaughn as the coach. It was a great cast all around.

On that note, is the movie perfectly accurate? Well, from what I can gather, it mostly is. The real Paige saw the movie and said that they nailed it. Reading over the real story, the middle section of the film might be a bit streamlined to make for a better flowing film. Vince Vaughan's character is more of a combination of characters and there's a few extra steps in the story that are avoided in order for it to make it work better as a movie. Then there's the curious case of Dwayne Johnson. When she first made her WWE appearance, he was the one that announced it to her, which was also the same conversation that he told her they were going to make a movie about her and her family. His other appearances are fictional, though, and mostly brief. He just makes a few appearances in the movie so that they could put him on the poster and advertise him as being in the movie. That might be a bit misleading if you're expecting this to be a Dwayne Johnson movie, but outside that I didn't have a problem with it. He wasn't distracting. I was just more amused by that. But yeah, props to the movie for a doing a good job at telling the real story. Even if it was more fictional, I had my defenses ready as to why I enjoyed it anyways, but I suppose we don't need to go down that route here.

So yeah, overall I think this is a really solid sports movie. I made a lot of comparisons to "Rocky" and "Creed" in this review and although "Fighting with My Family" isn't quite on the same level as those two movies, it deserves to be in the same conversation. And if the movie had played its cards right in terms of the release date, I think we'd be talking about Oscar potential nominations for Vince Vaughan or Nick Frost in supporting actor or maybe Florence Pugh or Jack Lowden in the lead actress/actor categories. In fact, I went over the best picture nominees in my head and I enjoyed this movie more than most of them. I'd put this as the third best. But anyways, that's just me still coming off my Oscar buzz from Sunday. Despite the great reviews, a sports drama debuting to $7.8 million domestically in its late February nationwide expansion won't even be on the Oscar radar at the end of the year. And that's alright. It provided me with some good relief that good movies still exist. And not that there's much competition at the moment, but it's my current favorite movie of the year and one I'm sure that I'll bring up in the future when it comes to how to properly make a good sports movie. Because of this, I'll confidently give "Fighting with My Family" a 9/10.