I originally didn’t have much interest in Christy, another entry into the boxing movie canon. But then the film premiered to a standing ovation at the Toronto International Film Festival and Oscar buzz began for Sydney Sweeney, so it got added to my watchlist. Opening to $1.3 million, the movie had one of the worst starts ever for a movie that was released in more than 2,000 North American theaters. Sydney Sweeney took to Instagram to say, “We don’t always just make art for numbers, we make it for impact. And Christy has been the most impactful project of my life.” Christy also joins a group of other recent movies, Die My Love, Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere, The Smashing Machine, that received high praise out of film festivals but failed to connect at the box office. Is the chasm between “art”, as Sweeney called it, and popular entertainment becoming wider? Or did the negative PR moment Sydney Sweeney has found herself in tank the film’s success? Maybe it’s telling that most of the conversations happening around Christy right now have little to do with the film itself. Because under all the controversy and box office panic lies a very run-of-the-mill boxing biopic. 

Unlike The Smashing Machine which came out just a month earlier, Christy follows the traditional bio-drama, sports movie formula. The film tells the true story of female boxer Christy Martin, a pioneer of women’s boxing in the late 1980s, who became arguably the most prominent and successful female boxer in the U.S. We follow her rise in the boxing world as well as the dark side of her personal life. Christy is discovered for her natural talents in the ring as a teenager in West Virginia. She has a spark, a fire. Through voiceover, Christy tells the audience she’s battling her inner demons when she gets in the ring. But she’s competitive and loves to win, celebrating with glee and attitude when she does. She gets set up with trainer Jim Martin to help take her career to the next level. Slowly but surely he does, but all while being hostile and controlling. Eventually he convinces Christy to marry him, but there’s no real love there. After signing a contract with infamous boxing promoter Don King, the first female boxer to do so, Christy’s career hits new heights. She becomes the face of the sport, the first female boxer to be featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated and really putting female boxing on the map. But when her career starts to move past its prime, her already fraught relationship with Jim becomes more and more harrowing. Drugs and threats and stealing money and blackmail and physical violence all come to a head when Christy tells Jim she’s leaving him and he tries to kill her. 

Under the guise of a boxing movie, Christy is really a story of abuse and domestic violence and how that shapes and alters a person. From the first second we are introduced to Jim Martin, it is clear that he hates women. He follows the classic grooming playbook with Christy, making her feel worthless, isolated, and dependent on him. We find out early on in the movie that Christy is attracted to women, but her parents are horrified by this. Jim uses this information against Christy to convince her that marrying him is her only option for a successful career and happy life. She was 22 and he was 47. His constant verbal abuse makes her hate herself and changes her slightly awkward and gleeful persona into a hardened, angry one. She takes out her self-hatred on her opponents. Not just in the ring, but outside of it, too, in press conferences and casual conversations, using offensive rhetoric and slurs. Christy also spends the majority of her time surrounded by men in a male-dominated world. She puts down other women to appeal to men and therefore get ahead, painting herself as a wife and homemaker who isn’t interested in furthering women’s sports. She’s out for herself and herself only. Christy’s former rival turned training partner, Lisa Holewyne (Katy O’Brian), eventually calls her out for her tough-girl bravado, noting how contrived it feels. Even she can see that isn’t who Christy really is, it’s just who she felt forced to become. All the while Christy’s relationship with Jim just progressively devolves. At first, the film doesn’t show much violence or abuse and just hints at it. But as Jim’s behavior becomes more severe, the film shows it more and more graphically until it peaks at the attempt on her life. After almost 20 years of marriage, 20 years of escalating abuse, Jim finally makes good on his constant threat of, “if you leave me, I’ll kill you,” and stabs Christy multiple times before returning a few minutes later to shoot her and leave her for dead on their bedroom floor. This scene is depicted in painstaking real time and nauseatingly gory detail. I felt genuinely sick to my stomach. And the scene was made all the more shocking that we hadn’t been shown a ton of violence in the film previous to this moment. We knew it was there, that it was happening, but mostly under the surface. Easy enough to try to ignore, push out of our minds for our own comfortability. But then we’re suddenly faced with extreme violence we can’t turn away from. It’s a harrowing portrait of domestic violence, one that is mirrored in the way it’s presented to the audience as it could have been prevented had anyone in their orbit not turned a blind eye to the obvious signs or calls for help. While the chilling depiction of Christy’s homelife is powerful, the movie sometimes seems lost between what story it wants to tell. It bounces back and forth between her ascent in the boxing world and her abusive relationship instead of making the two feel intertwined, resulting in a film that feels uneven tonally.  

A major piece of this movie is the Sydney Sweeney of it all. A rising star coming out of Euphoria and The White Lotus season 1, Sydney showed some movie star potential after her romcom with Glen Powell, Anyone But You, was a massive hit. Since then, she’s been choosing some interesting projects and been at the forefront of celebrity culture. But ever since her “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans” American Eagle campaign this past summer, she’s faced extensive backlash and public opinion about her has soured. I wasn’t jumping on the hate train with the jeans ad. I thought people were mostly overreacting and trying to make it into a bigger deal than it really was. But more recently, she’s started dating Scooter Braun who is objectively terrible and, after seeing her interviews about the jeans ad controversy, not only do I think she might be a bad person but I also think she’s potentially an idiot. Or maybe she just likes to be controversial which I also find annoying. I don’t think she’s going to be canceled for good, but she is kind of shooting herself in the foot a little bit with her public perception. And it might start affecting her career. Christy might be case in point. It’s a small, independent film about a figure most of the public isn’t familiar with. Sydney Sweeney as the star was the draw, the selling point. But now she’s also become the deterrent. Even her most loyal contingent of fans aren’t likely to support her in Christy; they view her as a sex symbol, something she is definitely not giving in this movie. 

But I came to the movie on the promise of an incredible performance from Sydney who, for the record, I have always thought was a talented actress… when she wants to be. And while she definitely goes full transformation to play Christy Martin, I don’t think her performance blew me away to a level that matched the hype. The role is raw and mature and physically demanding and Sydney reaches that bar. But whether it’s the character or her performance, the Christy we see in the film is pretty one-dimensional. It’s hard to tell what she’s really thinking or feeling most of the time. And while it’s true to life that victims of domestic violence are often extremely passive, we, as an audience, need more of a glimpse beyond that, to what’s going on inside her head and her heart, to be able to connect with her. Sydney was really good, but not great. And not in the running for an Oscar, in my opinion. Especially with Best Actress already shaping up to be a tough race this year. But, on the other hand, the Academy loves when actors undergo physical transformations for a part. Sweeney trained for two to three months with a boxing coach and also gained 30 pounds to portray Christy Martin. Variety summed it up thusly: “Christy has all the ingredients of a viable contender: a transformative lead performance, emotional intensity, social relevance and the biopic blueprint the Academy so often rewards.” So I guess we’ll just have to see come March. 

I thought Christy was totally fine. Another film marred in news stories and controversy that have nothing to do with the actual movie. But it’s not a bad movie. I’ll admit I did cry and people in my theater clapped when it ended. The story is compelling and poignant. And I definitely don’t want to take anything away from the very real hardships and accomplishments of the actual Christy Martin, who consulted on the film. But it just isn’t anything new. After watching it, I saw many people comparing it to I, Tonya, another movie about a rising female athlete struggling with a toxic relationship. I, Tonya is very different tonally and not exactly about the same thing but is still a better movie between the two as it has more style and more captivating performances. Christy is an inspirational sports movie that suffers from conventionality and possibly some bad PR.

2025 Count: 74 movies, 47 seasons of television, 4 specials