BEFORE: Halle Berry carries over from "Frankie & Alice", and here are the actor links that should get me through the month of August:
Halle Berry (2 more), Michael Peña, Lizzy Caplan, Karan Soni (again), Nik Dodani, Kaitlyn Dever, Edie Falco, Chloe Coleman, Bradley Cooper, Judy Greer, Steve Zissis, Jennifer Lafleur, Devon Graye, Christine Woods, Natasha Lyonne, Da'Vine Joy Randolph and Antonio Banderas.
Yeah, that's only 17 people, but it's 26 films covered this month. And I'm planning to get to "Avatar, the Way of Water", "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves", "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3" and the "Puss in Boots" sequel, plus a whole lot more. Then by Sept. 1 I should be very close to fitting in "Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny", which has Antonio Banderas in it. This month's going to just fly by, I can feel it.
AFTER: A disgraced MMA fighter finds redemption in the cage and the courage to face her demons when the son she had given up as an infant unexpectedly reenters her life.
I'm late getting this review up, because I fell asleep watching this movie, with about half an hour to go until the end. Which means that I missed the big fight - the whole reason to watch the movie in the first place! Now, normally I'd just rewind (or I guess we say "scan back" now, it we're watching the Netflix) and drink some more Diet Mountain Dew and stay up for 30 more minutes, but I had a job interview this morning, and I didn't want to oversleep. So I had to wait until AFTER I got home this afternoon - after the job interview and a trip to the AMC Empire 25 - to watch that last 30 minutes of movie. Very disappointed in myself, but I did get a job offer out of it. However, I probably won't take the job, it's a bit of a step backwards in my career, a non-management theater job, although the theater is VERY famous. Look, I've got just three more weeks left then my life returns to semi-normal, the theater re-opens and I get a little bump in pay, so I'm thinking I should just stay the course, keep doing what's been working for me for the last two years and see if I can progress at that job or somewhere else, not take a step back.
It's embarrassing - I wonder if caffeine is losing its effectiveness on me. You'd think with my second job on hold, I'd be able to get more sleep than usual, as I'm not currently working late nights at the theater, and I can sleep later four days a week now. But I can't let myself get used to this lazy summer lifestyle, as it's coming to an end in three weeks, when I have to report for duty at 7 am (!) to open the theater for the school-wide staff meeting. I worked this event last year, and the breakfast catering was pretty good, also an endless supply of iced coffee. But I drank so many to stay awake that I crashed around 1 pm and they sent me home to take a nap, which I did.
Anyway, this film is about a female MMA fighter - we had a boxing film just two days ago, and now mixed martial arts. But I'll admit I know even less about MMA than I do boxing, and that's saying something. She fights under the name "Jackie Justice" and at the start of the film, she's got a job cleaning for a rich family, but she gets fired after breaking the phone of a teen boy who tried to get video of her changing clothes. Then her live-in boyfriend, who is also her fight manager, convinces her she's got to get back into MMA fighting. This relationship is rather complicated and borderline (actually well OVER the border) abusive, though she can't really see it, or she chooses to ignore it. Also, I'm pretty sure it's a bad idea to be in a relationship with your manager. Just saying.
He takes her to an underground MMA "Fight Club" kind of event, and she gets recognized, and before you know it, she's encouraged to mix it up with another female fighter, The Werewolf. This leads her to start training again, but at the absolute worst possible time, her baby daddy's girlfriend shows up and drops off Manny, the son she abandoned 10 years ago. The kid is shy and withdrawn and doesn't talk, and also she has no experience being a mother, but she and her boyfriend take him in. (What could POSSIBLY go wrong?)
She has trouble getting him into school, she has trouble getting to the gym on time, she has more friction with her boyfriend because the kid has special needs. They don't really say if he's got autism or is just shy or is recovering from some trauma, but it doesn't really matter, and anyway she probably wouldn't even know enough about it to ask these questions. The kid needs attention and time, and she's got neither to give. Before long tensions between her and her boyfriend escalate, and she moves back in with her mother, who at least knows how to take care of a child.
Cue the "Rocky" (or "Creed") style training montage, and it's not long before she's back doing professional matches and gets a shot against the reigning female champion, Lady Killer. The good news is that she'll get paid either way, win or lose, it's just more if she wins. But just being in the fight should allow Jackie a shot at getting a new apartment for her and Manny. But as I keep telling my boss, $10K just doesn't go as far as it used to, not these days. So there's still no real long-term plan, except to keep fighting, I guess. She also starts a new relationship with her female trainer, and I'm pretty sure it's also a bad idea to be in a relationship with your trainer. But I guess some things just don't change, she's fallen into the same routine, just with a different gender, so I guess she gets a pass for that? Well, at least she's not drinking as much, so there's that.
The other connection to "Creed III" is that Michael B. Jordan made his directorial debut with that film, and Halle Berry did the same with "Bruised" in 2020.
Also starring Danny Boyd Jr., Shamier Anderson (last seen in "Endings, Beginnings"), Adan Canto (last seen in "X-Men: Days of Future Past"), Sheila Atim (last seen in "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness"), Stephen McKinley Henderson (last seen in "Dune" (2021)), Adriane Lenox (last seen in "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"), Valentina Shevchenko, Lela Loren (last seen in "The Man from Toronto"), Gabi Garcia, Yves Edwards (last seen in "Warrior"), Julie Kedzie, Jacob Crespo, Denny Dillon (last seen in "United 93"), Nikolai Nikolaeff, Jennifer Dugwen Chieng, Shawna Hamic, Robert D. Constance, Matan Gavish, Keith Peterson, Mark Fratto
RATING: 5 out of 10 rear naked chokes
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