This draws the attention of Invicta FC’s (a women’s fight promotion) fictional owner played by Shamier Anderson, who gives Jackie his business card. Finally pushed too far, Jackie smashes The Werewolf’s face, Jared Leto-in- Fight-Club style. There, a Russian she-hulk called “The Werewolf,” played by real-life she-hulk, jiu-jitsu champion Gabi Garcia (who doesn’t get many MMA fights for the simple reason that they can’t find many other women close enough to her 200-pound size to make a fight sanctionable) goads Jackie into a fight. In the film’s first fight scene, Jackie’s Puerto Rican boyfriend played by Adan Canto drags her to an underground fight in a basement.
It clocks in at a weighty 132 minutes, which I think most people would agree is too long for a genre picture about fighting. (Don’t bring up Warrior, someone always brings up Warrior, Warrior was fine).īruised is already off to a bad start the minute you look at the status bar.
It’s not that a movie with MMA movie needs to dissect the act of doing MMA, it’s just that most of the storylines MMA movies cover have already been done a hundred times already by better movies. Which is fine, it’s a dramatic sport, that’s why we like it. Most movie people tend to find in MMA a handy-dandy metaphor for whatever. Yet just because Halle Berry genuinely seems to like MMA doesn’t make her (or Bruised screenwriter Michelle Rosenfarb) any better at making a movie about it that’s actually good. Which is pretty weird/cool on the face of it, like seeing Cate Blanchett in the pit at your favorite punk show. So, yeah, Halle Berry seems to have gotten really into MMA.
Which the true MMA heads in the audience will instantly recognize as a callback to Jorge Masvidal’s answer to the question of whether his punches to a clearly unconscious Ben Askren were necessary, becoming a famous MMA meme (for fans of poetic justice, more or less the same fate would befall Masvidal himself a few fights later). In the next scene, when Jackie’s boyfriend/manager asks, “Was that really necessary?” Jackie responds, “Yeah, super necessary.” He apparently never got the “you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” memo, and Jackie the MMA she-Hulk tosses him roughly to the floor (I believe it was an osoto gari) and smashes his phone.
She protests, but he won’t give her the phone to delete the video. She’s changing her shirt in the laundry room of a big house in the suburbs when the teenage rich kid who lives there tries to record her topless on his cell phone. In one of the first scenes, Jackie, a down-on-her-luck UFC washout, has been reduced to cleaning houses. Still, there’s something oddly endearing about a 55-year-old (I had to look this up just now, before that I would’ve guessed she was about 44) Oscar winner deciding that the way she really wants to spend her clout is learning submission holds and pretending to get punched in the face by real MMA fighters. So sure, maybe Halle Berry, playing an MMA fighter named “Jackie Justice” in her directorial debut, is a little late to the party. This in an episode that featured a Tank Abbott cameo, aired all the way back in 1997, when the UFC was close to being banned in every state and Dana White was still teaching boxercise classes (given all the MMA references in Favreau’s later filmography, I assume the idea came from him, though I could be wrong). Jon Favreau deserves credit for being one of the first, introducing an MMA storyline into Friends, when his rich-guy character and boyfriend of Monica, Pete Becker, decides he wants to be UFC champion.
Gavin O’Connor, Dito Montiel, Kevin James, Mandy Moore - the list goes on. It seems like every few years, some prominent director or actor catches the MMA bug. That’s right, Halle Berry directs herself, as an MMA fighter looking for love, sobriety, redemption, and general peace of mind in Bruised, new this week on Netflix.