right then, Fighting with my Family, here comes a far too detailed review no one asked for but as a Wrestling/Paige and Film fan who grew up in Norwich I have a lot invested in it.
The short version is: it’s alright if a little disappointing but that’s my fault for listening to the positive reviews where I should have just gone in with my initial low expectations.
As a film it’s very generic sports/underdog feel good film-making, all the plot points from a narrative point of view are where you would expect them. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is noticeable. It has some pretty funny lines courtesy of Merchant’s writing and the Norwich stuff in the first half an hour is all pretty good (as that’s mostly based on the documentary of the same name from 2012). Nick Frost, Lena Headey and surprisingly, Vince Vaughn are all very good, Jack Lowden is fine but confusingly looks like a younger, beefier Simon Pegg. Florence Pugh, for me, never really gets into Paige/Saraya, however. Her accent is atrocious but she plays her/the script directs her to basically be this naive, whiny girl the whole time, and while I appreciate it would be extremely intimidating to go from Norwich to the performance centre in Florida, there’s no real reason to root for her OR any indication as to her importance in woman’s wrestling. As a result, tonally it’s a bit all over the place and it can’t quite seem to settle on what story it’s trying to tell, like her brother struggling back in Norwich is pretty dull but still takes up way too much screen time, hence why it ends up being quite a safe, generic tale.
Now, for the more wrestling focused bits (which towards the end I was finding incredibly difficult to not think about). Again, the early stuff showing the Knight family’s home promotion in Norwich is great and very accurate and the training montages when Paige/Saraya is at NXT are very effectively done and also seems pretty accurate as to how cutthroat of a business it is to succeed in. I get that they are positioning Paige as an outcast in the film, and to some extent, she is given she isn’t a traditional looking “Diva” as they were called at the time, but I don’t really buy this faux competition with the more traditional looking girls, who I know for a fact Paige is real life friends with these girls’ real-life counterparts, and she ends up being a bit of a dick to them and shown as useless on the mic which again, makes it quite hard to root for her success.
The film climaxes with Paige’s debut on Raw where she beats AJ Lee (here played by Selina Vega, lol) for the Diva’s title. This means “NXT” purely exists as a developmental thing which while true, means there’s little sense of her improving and becoming a star before she got to Raw, so again, within the film, it doesn’t feel particularly earned and kinda rushed. Afterwards, there was a card saying “Paige went on to have a great career, ushering in the Women’s Revolution” and I’m like WHY AREN’T YOU TELLING THAT STORY THAT’S A WAY MORE INTERESTING, POSITIVE STORY TO TELL. Part of this is just down to the weird time that Paige existed in within the WWE timeline and her sadly cut short career, but if they were ever to make a sequel about her actual career it would look a lot more like Aronofski’s The Wrestler. Also, fuck The Rock.
I know I’m far too invested and now recognise the film is aimed at the more casual fan but still, as someone who’s followed Paige’s whole career as a fan I can’t help feeling a little let down.
