Sweeney does her best with the material, which describes true and often deeply shocking events, and as a fighter of various types, she’s certainly credible. But if the role feels a little obvious as a career move, it’s nothing compared to the film itself, from Animal Kingdom and War Machine’s David Michôd, which buckles its protagonist into an all too familiar rise-and-fall straitjacket.
Martin, whose career ran for 23 years, was certainly a pioneering female fighter: she was the first woman to be signed by the legendary promoter Don King (broadly played here by The Wire’s Chad L Coleman). Michôd and Mirrah Foulkes’s screenplay suggests her gift might have been rooted in rage – “they say I fought like I was trying to destroy everyone who ever done me wrong,” Sweeney intones over the opening sequence – which grew in turn from the refusal of her mother (an intentionally exasperating, Lorraine McFly-ish Merritt Wever) to accept she was a lesbian, and later from the increasingly vile conduct of her older trainer and husband, Jim Martin.
