“There is no ripcord!” screams a furiously hammy John Turturro repeatedly in lurid boxing psychodrama The Cut, a film that often makes you wish there was one for us to pull. Not because it’s all just too intense but because what could have been a tough and probing study of over-the-cliff male body obsession instead becomes a ridiculously overcooked shock horror. The more British director Sean Ellis prods and provokes, the hokier it all gets, a film about cutting weight that could have benefited from a leaner edit.
Turturro is focusing his energy and ire on Orlando Bloom’s retired one-time great, hoping for an unlikely comeback, travelling from Ireland to Vegas for a high-stakes bout after another fighter dropped out. Bloom is an actor who also is in need of a career boost having struggled to graduate from franchise fodder to grownup fare, recently slumming it in low-rent action thrillers. As the unnamed boxer, he’s still hungry for a second chance although there’s one small catch: he’s about 30lb too heavy and there’s only a week to go. Shady promoter Donny (ex-Eastender Gary Beadle going full cartoon) is willing to take the risk with a little fiddling at an early weigh-in if it can then be lost with breakneck speed.
The boxer’s wife and business partner (Outlander’s Caitríona Balfe giving more than her role deserves) is concerned but willing to help, convinced of the importance this fight has to him, but when their team struggles to push him hard enough, Turturro’s take-no-prisoners trainer steps in to finish the job, no matter what it might cost.
From Rockys to Creeds and everything in between, we’ve come to mostly expect a boxing drama that gives us a reason to cheer, the grimness of the sport offset by a rousing, and inspiring, journey to victory. The Cut is, intriguingly at the outset, not that story. In a poorly shot yet viciously loud opening, we see what boxing has done to our protagonist, his final match leaving him with the physical scars to match his mental ones, illustrated through the film via some increasingly lurid, and sadly laughable, black-and-white flashbacks.
While alarms are raised early by some of Ellis’s shoddy film-making choices and the jarring inauthenticity of the supporting cast (the majority of Americans played by non-Americans), there’s an involving sense of urgency which propels us. Bloom has said that he lost 50lb for the film and we can really see his body changing as he pushes himself, exercising more and eating less. His character suffers from an eating disorder, a binge met with a purge, Ellis wanting us up close to witness the violence of making one’s self sick. It’s rare to see a male character deal with this, despite an alarming rise in the last two decades, but The Cut is less interested in the psychology of it and more in the horror.
The more weight he loses, the less he’s able to focus on what’s real and what’s not and the film shifts from tense thriller to slippery nightmare. His jolts back to childhood reveal a mother who sold her body for them to eat, and in one scene, something even worse. But Ellis renders us unshockable by the end, even as Bloom’s character is being drained of blood or trying to masturbate in front of others to lose weight. It all just goes from scary to silly too fast and any serious points about abuse, body dysmorphia and toxic masculinity are drowned out by Turturro’s incessant, and ineffectual, screaming. Ellis isn’t stylish enough to toggle back and forth between reality and imagination given that he’s barely able to sell us on the former (off-brand hip-hop-soundtracked training montages look like they were ripped from a fitness influencer’s Instagram while we’re never fully convinced that we’re in Vegas or even the US for the majority of the movie) with the film looking and feeling like it was made for TV. I was reminded of Elijah Bynum’s grimly similar bodybuilding drama Magazine Dreams, stuck in limbo now thanks to star Jonathan Majors and his allegedly abusive behaviour. Bynum told a familiar story but with such style and dynamism, bringing energy that is nowhere to be found here.
One can see the appeal for Bloom but his physical commitment isn’t enough to add muscle to a character with such little psychological depth and in an absurd, yet at that stage, expectedly gonzo finale, we lose any remaining interest in him or the film surrounding. It’s the final blow for a drama that could have been a contender.
The Cut is screening at the Toronto film festival and is seeking distribution
