@IAMSCF
This movie sucked. Sorry, not sorry. I know a lot of people worked very hard on this film. Sadly, much like its lead character — it didn’t deliver.
Cagefighter: Worlds Collide isn’t an underdog type of sports film. Rocky this ain’t. Unless I’m misremembering Rocky where he lost a fight, cried, then cried at least two more times, lost another fight, cried again, then somehow ends up (**SPOILER**) winning back everything he lost. I’m not saying that a man can’t cry, nor that it isn’t masculine to cry. The hero of a machismo-fueled action film shouldn’t be crying more than a scorned lover in a Lifetime movie. C’mon man. You’re the star of the film. You spent more time crying than training.
The story in Cagefighter is paper thin and barely touches reality. It felt like a rough draft that was never polished. At all. The story beats where there but zero nuance or finesse was applied. Your champion takes on a big PPV fight with a month’s time, (**SPOILER**), loses, takes another fight in less than a month, (**SPOILER**) loses again, retires — and about a month later (I’m guessing? There was no real attempt to show the passage of time, so everything’s a bit murky) trains for 3 weeks for a rematch he doesn’t deserve? Laughable.
The hero of this story is lacking so much charisma that even at the end of film while the credits are rolling, the fight promoter continues to talk about how awesome Jon Moxley’s character is and barely mentions the hero. And (**SPOILER**) Mox loses at the end!
The acting? Ooof. Look, I like Mox (John Goode if ya wanna be a dick about it) and his last film wasn’t terrible, but he’s playing a pro wrestler who’s the baddest man alive; I’m sure he really worked hard on finding his character and honing his craft here. Gina Gershon was lifeless, much like rest of the 3rd and 4th string characters. Jay Reno (Christian!) as a MMA radio host was about half as convincing as you’d imagine. But hey, he’s also an executive producer of this film, so that’s Hollywood for you.
The “lead” is Alex “Mean” Montagnani, whose MMA career at one time had promise, but he’s lost more matches than he’s won as of late. He was as equally unconvincing in the cage as he was outside of it. Look, when Chuck “The Iceman” Liddell is giving the best performance in a scene, you know things have gone seriously weird.
This fight scenes land somewhere between Rocky IV and Raging Bull. They go on way too long, and are a technical mess/fantasy scenario. The climax of the film is our hero pinned against the cage taking a beating for what felt like two forevers before he casually slips on a headlock choke for the win.
You want to watch an MMA movie? Go watch Kevin James in Here Comes The Boom. Don’t waste your time. Life’s too short…unlike the scenes of this dude crying. 1/5 Bible.
–Sean Farrell