It’s a fact universally acknowledged that there are solely two viable profession choices for retired boxers: promoting plastic kitchen crap in infomercials, and ingesting your self right into a lonely dying of despair till you get talked into coaching a smart-ass younger fighter and rediscover your thirst for all times. If anybody is on the fence about which path to decide on after hanging up their gloves, Vincent Grashaw’s “Bang Bang” offers a great illustration of each paths.
Within the Nineteen Eighties, the town of Detroit was enthralled by the boxing rivalry between Darnell Washington (Glenn Plummer) and Bernard “Bang Bang” Rozyski (Tim Blake Nelson), two hometown heroes whose eventual struggle was among the many decade’s most extremely anticipated sporting occasions. Not solely did Washington win the struggle, he’s gained just about the whole lot else since. After making a fortune promoting his trademarked juicers, he now presides over a Detroit enterprise empire and has launched a marketing campaign for mayor. Rozyski is his inverse, dwelling in poverty and confining himself to a hermit-like existence of ingesting and complaining that he received screwed within the career-defining bout.
His solitude is rudely interrupted when his estranged daughter Jen (Nina Arianda) exhibits up at his doorstep asking him to absorb his teenage grandson whereas she establishes herself at a brand new job in Chicago. Justin (Andrew Liner) can’t go away the town on account of a group service sentence he picked up after getting right into a schoolyard altercation, so he turns into a reluctant visitor in a home barely liveable for one particular person, not to mention two.
Bang Bang and his grandson don’t bond straight away. Justin is a troubled, phone-addicted teen, and Bernard is a strolling cliche who by no means misses a possibility to soliloquize about how his life, his metropolis, and the world at giant have gone to shit. He shakes his metaphorical fist at everybody who he believes has shafted him all through the years, behaving like a person who has each purpose to imagine that he’s down for the depend.
However identical to so many crusty outdated fighters in so many films, the lovable curmudgeon finds a brand new lease on life when he decides to coach Justin as a boxer. He regales the teenager with tales of the cash and the “high drawer pussy” that flowed his approach as a younger man till Justin agrees to tackle an exhibition bout at a charity occasion sponsored by Washington. It looks as if an incredible thought till the child suffers a brutal knockout, prompting Rozyski to allege foul play as soon as once more and query whether or not another sort is even attainable in a sport that consists of grown males beating one another inside an inch of their lives.
At first look, “Bang Bang” looks as if a dreadfully cliche-ridden movie. Nelson throws the whole lot he has on the eponymous character, however the washed-up fighter archetype who spits poetry in regards to the demons he now battles has been performed to dying. But it turns into clear these cliches are the purpose. As Bernard struggles to reckon with the whole lot his life within the ring has price him, he tries to shoehorn his personal life story right into a popular culture system about retired boxers that he doesn’t fairly match into. It’s obvious when he convinces Justin to begin preventing. It’s virtually as if Bernard has seen too many boxing films and is simply ready patiently for the second his grandson asks him for assist in the ring in order that he can inform him to fuck off thrice earlier than reluctantly agreeing. That second by no means comes, so the outdated man takes issues into his personal fingers. He would possibly behave like a damaged man who is able to shut himself off from the world, however he carries himself with the vitality of somebody who nonetheless has some struggle left.
As Bernard’s re-entry into the game forces him to confront the tales he’s spent a lifetime telling himself, he reluctantly accepts that sorting the world into good guys and unhealthy guys is a job for sportswriters and filmmakers, not dying males who’re truly in search of the reality. As he pulls himself out of his personal narrative framework and takes inventory of his life, all his favourite sports activities platitudes start to ring hole. Boxing followers can discover countless quantities of poetry in a great bout, however generally, guys simply hit one another as a result of they don’t know another approach to reside.
Grade: B
“Bang Bang” premiered on the 2024 Tribeca Movie Pageant. It’s at present in search of U.S. distribution.