You have to hand it to the film-makers. Here’s a class of boxing film we haven’t seen before. It’s not the only flick in the genre this year to contain almost no actual ring action. Maurice O’Carroll’s Irish film Swing Bout already managed that feat. But The Cut is surely the only boxing film to feature more vomiting, weeing and, umm, self-pleasuring than prize fighting.
This simultaneously weird and hackneyed picture is principally about the business of losing weight to qualify for a chosen division. The ultimate catastrophe finds Orlando Bloom’s ageing slugger shedding the last bit of mass in the most dramatic manner imaginable. We shan’t say what that is, but, safe to say, he has already employed the five-finger shuffle.
Things begin conventionally enough with the unnamed former champ running a gym with his supportive partner (Caitríona Balfe, largely wasted) in an unfashionable part of town. Recreational detractors of the Micksploitaiton flick – much in discussion of late – will be initially disappointed by the duo’s tolerable Dublin accents and then delighted to discover that the hero, much seen in flashback, seems to have grown up in the Belfast depicted in a notorious 1992 episode of the Captain Planet cartoon. The graffiti doesn’t exactly say “Down with the queen!” but it is close enough.
To be fair, we are invited to assume Bloom’s character fled the Troubles after his mum – Clare Dunne in frantic form – got in fatal trouble with the IRA for fraternising with soldiers. So the Dub accent may have been a later addition.
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Back in the present, our fighter, in the style of Rocky, lands one big comeback fight when a challenger drops out. The problem? He is substantially above the required weight. Enter John Turturro sparing no tendon in his efforts to embody the ruthless (and, in this case, unscrupulous) boxing trainer of legend.
“Your girl will only hurt you so much,” he spits. “You ‘play’ baseball and tennis. You don’t ‘play’ boxing,” he adds. As much of his efforts are devoted to getting the fat off as perfecting jabs and uppercuts.
It’s all impressively raw and butch. Ten minutes in, the audience will be longing for a shower to wash away the sweat (and any other bodily fluids). But The Cut is ultimately too broad, cliched and preposterous to take the belt. Still, it was brave to go where it went.
In cinemas from Friday, September 5th
