Against the Ropes

Against the Ropes

We have all seen the Slow Clap Scene, where a key character walks into a room and it falls silent. And everyone knows what is about to happen; everyone is alert and tense, waiting for it. Then one person claps slowly then two people clap, three people clap, four people clap and suddenly the tension breaks and everyone is clapping, even the sourpuss hold-outs. Can we also agree that this scene is an ancient cliche? Yes, yes we can. And yet sometimes I am still amazed when it works.

It works at the end of “Against the Ropes,” a boxing biopic about Jackie Kallen (Meg Ryan), who in real life was (and is) the first female fight promoter in the all-male world of professional boxing. It works and so does another cliche: The Big Fight scene, right out of “Rocky” or any other boxing movie you’ve ever seen, where the hero spends most of his energy getting pounded into blood pudding but then inspired by something he heard between rounds from somebody he cares about staggers back out there for Round 10 filled with skill and fury.

“Against the Ropes” wanders around feeling its way uncertainly through time until it gets to roughly the final third of its running time, when all of a sudden it starts hitting things very hard. Its setup story is flat and lacks authenticity; Ryan’s performance as Kallen shows no more than that she would like to be able to play this kind of role well; Omar Epps as her boxer Luther Shaw gives us everything there is here to give except what isn’t in this particular piece of writing (i.e., anything); against these last two actors’ performances there stands one awfully underwritten script.

The film plays for too long like a short quick shallow made for TV biopic but then relies on ancient conventions from hackneyed boxing movies and they bring it on home.

When we meet Kallen, she is the assistant to Cleveland’s top boxing promoter. She grew up in boxing; her dad ran a gym and when she was a little girl he sometimes had to chase her out of the ring. Now she knows as much about boxing as anyone but of course a woman isn’t allowed to know such things. Then, while watching a fight in an illicit drug apartment somewhere in the ghetto, she watches this (non drug related) guy waltz in and cream everybody there, and she just intuits that he could be a great fighter.

This is Luther Shaw (Epps), who has psychic wounds from childhood that sometimes unleash an incredible fury. Kallen persuades him he can be a fighter (he’s not at all difficult to persuade); signs him on; hires a trainer to prepare him for his first few bouts; edges around the Cleveland boycott against her by convincing some Buffalo promoter it’s time for him to return all those favors he got from her dad back in the day; tells Shaw they’re going to make history and so forth.

Many of the scenes in this stretch are routine workups or even rip-offs from other sports movies (example: As soon as we hear “He only trains champions,” we know [a] that means Joe Torre would fire him tomorrow if he were managing boxers, and [b] that Jackie needs exactly this guy). Dutton plays Jackie’s trainer with wonderful authority and also directed much better than this.

Ryan works hard at Jackie Kallen, but it is not her role. Ryan is an enormously gifted actress best at comedy but plenty noir enough for darker turns; good at thrillers; one of many very fine actors still waiting for their shot at playing Lady Macbeth but she is not naturally brassy. Or possibly even loud. And yet here she is trying to play a woman who buys her wardrobe at Trashy Lingerie and Victoria’s Secret, and talks like a girl who grew up in the gym. Rougher notes might have been more appropriate for this Gina Gershon, for instance. Ryan seems to be pushing it.

There is a problem with Renee (Kerry Washington), who is Kallen’s best friend and, I believe, Luther’s girlfriend. Or so I think; the part is so thinly written that it might as well not be there. The central relationship in the movie is between Luther and Kallen, who are never shown to be attracted to each other.

Dutton (working from a screenplay by Cheryl Edwards) doesn’t seem terribly interested in Luther’s private emotional life, so we get scenes that don’t make sense like Luther hanging out or being best friends with Renee or what? They hardly have any lines together, and while Renee cheers during the big fight, there is no scene where her feelings for her man are resolved: The focus is on Kallen, which is fine but leaves this thread dangling.

But Epps is always good, and by the last act of the movie I had made my peace with Ryan because she’d become more interesting. Drunk with publicity (the fight tickets sell out), she starts thinking it’s about her and not her boxer; eventually she turns into a media caricature and finds herself alienated from the world she helped create. Then comes the Big Fight and then the Slow Clap and goddamn if I wasn’t moved by it all.

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