It’s been a weird year to be a Barry Jenkins fan. After delivering a trifecta of truly beautiful masterworks from 2016 to 2021 with Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk, and The Underground Railroad, this year sees not just his latest directorial project being the depressingly bland Lion King prequel Mufasa, but also providing the utterly underbaked script to The Fire Inside. The story of the young-but-already-legendary Claressa Shields and her rise from poor kid in Flint, Michigan (the film was originally called Flint Strong) to the greatest woman boxer of all time, it’s a take as generic and personality-free as its title, unable to make any sort of dent in a very overcrowded genre.
As played by Ryan Destiny (in her mid-20s but very convincingly portraying a teenager), we follow Claressa mostly from 2011 to 2013, aged just 16/17, as her unbelievable talent propels her through local, regional, and national stages before winning the gold medal at the 2012 London Olympics during the inaugural games for women’s boxing. Though Claressa’s youth does bring a novelty factor, this is a story that is painfully paint-by-numbers, from the grim and gritty home life back in Flint with a flaky alcoholic mother to the surrogate father relationship she has with her coach Jason (Brian Tyree Henry).
Dialogue and story beats are just bland, though The Fire Inside does pick up more of its own identity *after* Claressa’s gold medal victory, as she returns to Flint still without sponsorship money, right back to the grind of school and financial insecurity that she’s always known. It’s territory that feels less familiar for the genre, an effectively infuriating look at how being the *literal* best in the world at a sport can still not be enough to overcome the odds stacked against a poor, Black woman in America.
It raises the film’s bar, but still not quite high enough to be massively memorable – it suffers, also, from Destiny’s lead performance being only ok, hardly the kind of heavyweight central force that a sports biopic needs to stand out. Of course, Henry is good, because he always is – had the role of Jason gone to Ice Cube, as was originally planned, The Fire Inside might have collapsed entirely. Crucially, the actual boxing scenes are also really weak. First time director Rachel Morrison (best known as the cinematographer for Black Panther) makes The Fire Inside mostly look very handsome, but the stuff in the ring is dull and lethargic, not a patch on, say, Ryan Coogler or Michael B Jordan’s much more thrilling work across the Creed series.
Stopped by COVID, actor dropouts, and a clearly torturous edit process (it wrapped back in 2022), it’s taken nearly five years from the first day of shooting for The Fire Inside to reach us. It’s a nice little behind-the-scenes backstory of perseverance to match what we see on screen, but I can hardly say that the final result is worth the wait. As far as inoffensive crowd-pleasers go, it’s just about fine, but you won’t remember a thing about it a couple of days after the credits have rolled.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 