BEFORE: I've got one more day left in May after today, and maybe just one more week on staycation/lockdown after that. Right now June 8 is the target date to start re-opening New York City, and at least one boss wants to re-open an animation studio on that date. If the other boss feels the same, then I'm back in business and off the dole. I can also get back to borrowing some screeners, right now there's just one or two key ones I'd love to see in June to avoid paying for them on iTunes. I devised a June schedule that steered clear of movies only available to me on screeners, for the most part, but in some cases it just couldn't be avoided. Hey, if I have to pay a $3.99 or even a $5.99 rental fee here and there, that's fine, I just don't want to do that too often, free is always better.
This means that movie theaters MIGHT be back in business soon (and restaurants, casinos, bars) but let's not get ahead of ourselves - I think the infection rates and death tolls in NYC will have to stay down for the government to consider moving to Phases 2 & 3. If I'm lucky then maybe I can see "Wonder Woman 1984" in a movie theater in August, which I have a way to link to, only the chain is about 10 days too short. Sure, I could take 10 days off from movies in August, but let's not get crazy, we may not be traveling anywhere, so that's 10 days at home without movies. Spending about 75 days at home WITH movies was difficult enough.
Stephen Merchant carries over from "Good Boys", and also directed this one.
THE PLOT: A former wrestler and his family make a living performing at small venues around the country while his kids dream of joining World Wrestling Entertainment.
AFTER: Amazingly, wrestling was one of the first, if not THE first sport to come back after everything shut down. I think maybe Korean baseball was being broadcast first, but shortly after that, the WWE got themselves declared as "essential" to the Florida economy and started holding matches again, I think without crowds at first. Since then, Florida's been fully re-opened and people are enjoying the beaches and restaurants (and soon, theme parks) there, what could POSSIBLY go wrong? Answer: everything, because it's Florida. But it's not like there's a lot of older people living in Florida, right? Oh, wait...
This film was based on a documentary about a real U.K. wrestling family, the one that produced WWE wrestler Paige, whose real name is Saraya-Jade Bevis, though in this partially-fictionalized version, her name is Saraya Knight. Only her first name was her mother's wrestling stage name (Sweet Saraya), then it became her name, but this was too confusing so she started going by Britani, then Paige, which to me seems even more confusing. OK, maybe the real Saraya was named after her mother's wrestling persona, but then that fact didn't HAVE to carry over into the fictional film, it only mucked everything up, to the point where I couldn't tell if somebody was talking about the mother or the daughter in the family. The real Saraya/Paige makes a cameo in the film, but thankfully, not as herself, which would have been even more hard to follow.
There's a lot of good father-daughter interaction stuff here, where at first wrestling is just "that silly thing Dad does" to something that the family can do all together, to an activity that Paige can excel at and actually surpass her father's career, and then her father is probably both proud and jealous, and gets upset when she falters and wants to quit. It's a great story arc for anyone who tried very hard not to become their parents but ended up becoming a version of them anyway, which is nearly everyone, right?
This is the best character that I've seen Florence Pugh play to date - I didn't care so much for her character in "Little Women", but some of that can be blamed on Louisa May Alcott, plus whoever decided to chop that movie into little bits and present it non-linearly. I found her character in "Midsommar" to be really annoying, but again, that's not necessarily her fault if she was told to play a whiny, demanding character. You do the best performance you can with the parameters given, I guess. The only caveat here is that Paige comes off sometimes as the sulky, disconnected Goth girl, and when she confronts the "cool kid" wrestlers who have been making fun of her, somehow it's made out to be HER fault, that she doesn't have any friends because she never took steps to make friends with the "cool kids". That's a little too close to victim blaming, but I guess maybe if someone's been ignored or picked on for too long, maybe they tend to go into new situations with a pre-conceived attitude that it's going to happen again.
But man, is there a person on the planet who seems more comfortable in front of the camera than Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson? Wrestling, acting, whatever he's doing, he's super cool, I finally get the appeal. He's the character and the character is him and we are all together. Goo goo g'joob. If he ever had nerves or stage fright, you get the feeling it was a LONG time ago. Sure, nobody's putting him in a Victorian-era costume drama where he has to rally support for the Queen, then dance a waltz, but still, as long as he sticks to action movies and light comedy, he's so much more of a natural than someone like, say, Tom Cruise.
The debate has raged for years about whether wrestling counts as a sport or entertainment. It's physical, sure, but there are storylines and the outcomes are pre-determined, and much like soap operas or comic books, they represent storylines that don't have endings, which tends to keep the public coming back for more. It's somehow sports AND entertainment, so maybe on some level, it is essential, at least to some people. I think somehow the message of the film is the same as the WWE's corporate strategy, don't be who everybody wants you to be, just be yourself and keep working at it. On that level, this film kind of won me over at the end, even though what happens in the WWE barely affects my life at all.
Also starring Florence Pugh (last seen in "Midsommer"), Lena Headey (last seen in "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies"), Nick Frost (last seen in "Tomb Raider"), Jack Lowden (last seen in "Dunkirk"), Vince Vaughn (last seen in "Hacksaw Ridge"), Dwayne Johnson (last seen in "Race to Witch Mountain"), James Burrows, Hannah Rae, Thea Trinidad, Kim Matula, Aqueela Zoll, Ellie Gonsalves, Julia Davis (last seen in "Love Actually"), Tori Ellen Ross, with cameos from Paul "Big Show" Wight (last seen in "MacGruber"), Stephen "Seamus" Farrelly, Michael "The Miz" Mizanin (last seen in "The Campaign"), the voices of Jerry Lawler, Jim Ross, Michael Cole, and archive footage of Hulk Hogan (last seen in "Gremlins 2: The New Batch"), "Stone Cold" Steve Austin (last seen in "Grown Ups 2"), John Cena (last heard in "Ferdinand"), Paul "Triple H" Levesque, Ultimate Warrior.
RATING: 6 out of 10 giant truck tires
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