‘The Cut’ Review: An Inventive Boxing Movie That Pulls Its Punches

Sports movies are one of the bedrock genres of film. Generally, they follow an athlete or team as they prepare for the epochal fight, match, or game, leaving the rest of the story to revolve around it. Think Rocky and his fight against Creed, Miracle and the 1980 Olympic medal game, or even Challengers and the Phil’s Tire Town Open.

The Cut defies generalities, bringing forth a new sports narrative that isn’t really about the big fight at all. Orlando Bloom stars as a retired boxer looking for redemption in one final fight in Sean Ellis‘s newest movie. Although the film brings an inventive narrative to the ring by focusing on the process of cutting weight to qualify for the fight instead of the actual title fight itself, The Cut surprisingly offers very little originality in the sports movie genre and pulls its punches from start to finish.

What Is ‘The Cut’ About?

The opening scene of The Cut is exactly what you would expect out of a boxing movie — a raucous audience egging on two competitors in a boxing ring, blood spurting from mouths and wounds, and thunderous punches to back it all up. After this fight — in which an unnamed boxer known only as The Wolf of Dublin (Bloom) loses — Sean Ellis executes an upper jab and immediately switches up the story being told.

Instead of using a redemptive boxing match 10 years later as the centerpiece of the film, it is merely used as an end goal for the real journey of cutting the weight to qualify for the fight. The Wolf of Dublin isn’t what he used to be and after a career-souring loss, it makes sense that he is now running a small boxing gym with a few extra pounds around the belt.

He runs the gym with his wife Caitlin (Caitríona Balfe) and longs for the glory days of his boxing career. The Wolf of Dubline is soon given an opportunity to return to said days through a competitive match in Las Vegas. The only problem is that he needs to accomplish the near-impossible task of losing 26 pounds in 6 days.

Enter John Turturro‘s character Boz, a hardass, deadpan, “doesn’t-care-about-you-at-all” type of trainer. Bloom’s character quickly latches on to his style of intense, if not over-exuberant, training that includes methods that are less than morally upstanding. And so the process of The Cut begins, stepping away from a traditional boxing storyline and exploring the darker, internal depths that go into preparing to step inside the ring.

Sean Ellis’ Boxing Flick Relies on Common Tropes

Of course, the film is not without its innovative sequences that predominantly happen in the final 20 minutes of its compact 1-hour and 39-minute runtime. But the training montages (yes, more than one!), black-and-white flashbacks of the boxer’s childhood, and emotional crescendos induced by the grimy trainer inevitably pushing our athlete too hard all dissipate that fascinating nature of focusing on the run-up to the ring and solidify that its harder to break the mold of a common boxing movie than you think.

Orlando Bloom elevates the film to a physical level that is both impressive and exhausting to watch, running on a treadmill or wrapping himself in towels, sweating out his weight more than a few times. Balfe counters his physicality with an emotional drive that is a trope as old as time in the sports movie genre, knocking out her performance.

With pacing that feels like a roller coaster with one too many humps, The Cut finds itself succumbing to the rote checkboxes of any ordinary boxing flick. Conversely, when Ellis lets Turturro really inhabit his dastardly trainer nature, the movie brings something new to the ring. As the boxer tries to escape the prison of his own addiction to the sport and the process as the title fight draws closer, the climax of the film gives his final weigh-in. Were the nefarious actions enough to lose the weight? And even more importantly, was it worth it?

Pulled Punches Result in an Overall Loss in ‘The Cut’

Sean Ellis has some great ideas conveyed throughout the film that are emotionally effective yet get muddled down through his reliance on following a standard narrative game plan. The Cut offers the opportunity to knock out the idea of what a boxing movie that isn’t really about boxing can — and should — be. It falls quite short of executing on that knock-out, finding energy in its final minutes that amount to too little too late.

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