The Rock gets pinned in a film about wrestling
Dramedy inspired by a charming documentary is as predictable as a WWE smackdown. By
Afew years ago documentary director Max Fischer made a film for the UK’s Channel Four called The Wrestlers: Fighting with my family. It told the story of affable working-class heroes, the Knight family of Norwich — the last great hopes of fading British wrestling and founders of their own low-level wrestling association. It showed them travelling to small towns, putting on shows for depressingly small crowds in pubs.
Patriarch Ricky Knight, supported by his devoted wife Julia, raised their children as participants in the family business and had high hopes for daughter Saraya and son Zak, who they hoped would go on to success in the pro-wrestling’s super league of the US’s WWE.
Their perseverance was rewarded when Saraya became the youngest non-US woman accepted into the organisation.
The Knights had a particularly British, no-nonsense, working-class charm that gave the documentary an easy-to-root-for tone. Its story attracted the attention of former wrestler and Hollywood box-office drawcard Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson. Johnson had also come from a wrestling family and related to the bittersweet journey of the Knights. He bought the rights to their story and turned to his friend Stephen Merchant to whip the raw material of Fischer’s film into a WWE-supported, family-friendly tale of overcoming adversity and believing in your dreams.
As the geeky giant who is best known as the co-creator with Ricky Gervais of the British series The Office and Extras, Merchant has brought his blend of blackly empathetic humour to a film that fits snugly within the line of British dramedy that’s populated screens and predictably put bums on seats for the past two decades.
Starring Florence Pugh as Saraya, Nick Frost as Ricky Knight, Lena Headey as Julia and Jack Lowden as Saraya’s less-lucky wrestling brother Zak, Fighting with My Family delivers all the fuzzy, warm charms of its easily hit narrative highs and lows without adding much interest to either British dramedy or sports films.
There’s a bit of Billy Elliot mixed with many of the elements of every early ’90s Disney sports comedy about loveable losers, some obvious training montages and a rousing finale to round it all off into a forgettable, sentimental piece of lightweight fluff.
Vince Vaughn phones in his performance as the tough-love WWE talent scout/trainer, while the Rock turns up to give a horribly awkward rendition of himself.
In spite of a heartfelt and physically dedicated performance from Pugh, the characters are pretty flat and onedimensional and the narrative quickly becomes dull. There’s nothing much you learn about the inner workings of wrestling as a form of sports entertainment, and there’s even less you learn about the people in its ranks.
Merchant’s failure to exploit any of the unique elements of the story that would elevate it above the emotional peaks and troughs of its genre’s requirements is disappointing and ultimately unforgivable.
It turns out that in spite of his personal connection to the story of the Knights and his own experiences as a WWE phenomenon, the final product that the Rock has produced lacks authenticity and suffers from a level of predictability that’s higher than that you’d expect from a WWE Raw storyline.
To answer his most famous question, yes, we can smell what the Rock is cooking and its aroma carries for miles, heavy with the nauseating scent of recycled chip oil. LS