UPPERCUT – Review by Liz Braun
In Uppercut, a hopeful young boxer tries to convince a legendary trainer to take her on and mentor her. The film is a character study, a lengthy conversation between a world-weary boxing expert at the end of his run and a determined young woman at the start of her career, hoping to fight her way to the top. The story unfolds as they spend one momentous evening together at his gym, sparring physically and verbally and getting to know one another as they talk about music, dance, skill and the history of various boxing greats.
The action flashes back and forth between their brief time together, a meeting that took place in the recent past, and some glimpses of our determined young heroine in the present-day, where she has become a successful boxing manager herself.
Written and directed by Torsten Ruether, Uppercut stars Ving Rhames as Elliott, the trainer long past his prime, and Luise Grossmann as Toni, the young fighter desperate for Elliott’s guidance. Joanna Cassidy and Jordan E. Cooper are also in the cast.
Uppercut has a scrappy start, first showing Toni in the present day giving one of her fighters a pep talk, then suddenly switching back in time eight years. We now follow a younger Toni as she wanders around New York City, eventually letting herself into a building despite the prominent No Trespassing sign.
This is Elliott’s gym, obviously a sacred place to Toni, who has no business being there. Elliott appears with a baseball bat, convinced some young hoodlum has come into his space. After this initial showdown, the two start talking. They talk about past champions, about what it takes to be a great fighter, about the fact that Toni is somewhat troubled. There are also further flashes of Toni in the present as a successful entrepreneur.
About 20 minutes in, Elliott says, “So you want to box — I don’t train fighters, I make fighters,” a crucial scrap of dialogue that is the first real bit of storyline guidance for a viewer. Overall, Uppercut has a tendency to meander, leaving both past and present stories somewhat confusing and never really melding the two. There are also issues with the dialogue; much of it does not ring true, and some of it is lost completely just based on individual line delivery. It doesn’t help that Ving Rhames brings a gravitas to his role as Elliott that leaves Luise Grossman looking like a rookie in her part as Toni; there’s enough unlikely dialogue involved to render Toni more annoying as a character than affecting.
Uppercut started life as a low-budget indie drama (called Leberhaken) set in Germany. The movie was re-made for American audiences, with Grossmann in her original role as the hopeful boxer and Rhames taking over for the remake as Elliott. Experiencing Uppercut is more like seeing a play than a film; it seems fair to say that something may have been lost in translation.
