Fighter’s doco no fairytale of redemption
It’s impossible not to respect what Mark Hunt has achieved thus far.
Hunt was born into a hellish home-life, dominated by a father who was either absent or sadistically battering his children for any real or imagined transgression.
Hunt entered the judicial system as though he was on a conveyer belt. That childhood and a lack of intervention or support from any agency made it damn near inevitable that a guy with his talent for throwing a punch and a notoriously short fuse would finish up on the wrong side of the law.
But prison, unusually, was the making of Hunt.
He responded to the discipline and the enforced sobriety and found a sense of purpose that would serve him well when his professional fight career took off.
Hunt was talent-spotted by a nightclub bouncer while in a brawl in central Auckland.
It’s hardly a storybook beginning, but some of history’s greatest boxers have started their careers in similar circumstances.
Despite having no formal training, except for a few weeks at an Auckland gym, Hunt won his first bout – against a Muay Thai opponent – and then spent the next few years defying everybody’s expectations that he would never be more than a hardhitting journeyman.
Hunt moved to Australia, settled in Sydney and began to train in earnest.
His granite jaw, immense physical strength and years of street-fighting, combined with the discipline and training, combined to make Hunt a formidable fighter.
He has won Oceania-wide tournaments as a kickboxer, fought and won in Mixed Martial Arts tournaments in Japan and was picked to join the lucrative UFC tour in 2014.
In Mark Hunt: The Fight of His Life, director Peter Brook-Bell finds Hunt in a mostly cheerful and communicative mood, looking back on a career with more highs than lows, while still brooding and angry about the drug-use he has encountered within the UFC, which he says does not get meaningfully punished – and still unforgiving and troubled by the hell of his childhood.
This film is not a fairytale of redemption, despite what the marketing is telling you. But a fairytale that arose from these circumstances would be almost unimaginable except in pure fiction.
Hunt’s apparent lack of concern or remorse for the men he beat-up and robbed in the past is disturbing.
‘‘I think he was a taxi driver,’’ he says of one, which seems to me to be a chilling way to acknowledge a beating that was severe enough to land Hunt in prison for the second time.
Mark Hunt: The Fight of His Life is a mostly thorough and well-assembled look at a life. But some of the blindspots here are hard to justify and weaken what could have been a remarkable film.
Mark Hunt: The Fight of His Life (M) is now screening in select cinemas nationwide.