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‘Uppercut’ Review: Big Apple-Set Remake of German Boxing Drama Gets Lost in Translation
Familiar ideas get mired in too much labored talk as writer-director Torsten Reuther and his star return for a New York-set revamp of their 2021 film.
What was already a problematically stagey wade into normally action-oriented terrain — the underdog sports drama — gains additional hurdles here from the writer-director’s tin ear for English dialogue, as well as the inexplicable return of a lead actor even less adept in a foreign tongue. The setup may well remind you of prior female boxer films, notably “Million Dollar Baby” and recent “The Fire Inside.” Alas, it never really gets beyond their narrative starting gates, in which a green but determined young woman pushes to be accepted as pupil by an initially dismissive, reluctant veteran trainer. Early on, the older Toni is revving up her own protégé (Jordan E. Cooper as Payne) before a match by telling him “They said, ‘You ain’t creek enough!’” At least that’s what it sounds like; it takes us a minute to realize she means “quick enough.” Whole speech passages likewise get garbled into indecipherability, further straining the dynamic with Rhames, who’s got his own weak lines and stereotypical character aspects to deal with while shouldering most of the film’s forced gravitas.
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