I’m a big fan of sports movies, as I’ve said many times, and specifically, boxing films are among my favorites more often than not. Raging Bull Rocky and The Fighter are some of my favorite films of all time. I’m very skeptical of most boxing films that come out. An underrated boxing film that I love is Girl Fight, starring Michelle Rodriguez. It’s one of the best I’ve seen. That being said, The Fire Inside has an uphill battle confiding its subject matter. 

Clarissa (Ryan Destiny) is a young inner-city girl from Flint, Michigan. She comes from a low-income household. She has a couple of siblings she loves and a mother who she doesn’t. She was fed up with her circumstances, so she decided at a young age she wanted to be trained as a boxer. She goes to a local gym and gets the trainer, who was an ex-boxer himself, Jason Crutchfield (Bryan Tyree Henry), to train her. She has what it takes to be a boxer, but it’s not her rise to fame as a boxer in the Olympics that makes this story as good as it turned out. It’s her struggles in life before and after her boxing success in the ring, at home, and abroad.

Ryan Destiny is an actress I wasn’t that familiar with until I saw her in this movie. She controlled the screen with her moody demeanor and scowl. The anger she has in her character helps propel the film forward. She obviously trained as a boxer to look as good as she did in the ring. It’s not her performance that I wasn’t concerned with in this movie. It was the structure of how Barry Jenkins wrote the story overall. She is a young actress to watch in the future. She reminds me of Dominique Fishback in a lot of ways in that sense. She burst on the scene in Judas and the Black Messiah, and she was getting good roles after that. I see that for Destiny as well. A little bit more seasoning as an actor, and she’ll be ready for bigger, more prestigious roles. 

Bryan Tyree Henry is an actor who I’ve seen grow into one of the better-supporting actors of this generation. Roles in Causeway, Bullet Train, and Eternals have shown he’s got the chops to succeed in this business. His voice-over work, in Transformers One, and television roles, in shows like Atlanta, have also been stellar. The role he has as the mentor/ coach in this film are the kinds of roles I want to see him in, though. He brings an emotional heft that I wanted to see in this character. He even has an Ark of his own to work through in the film. He gave me Mickey (Burgess Meredith), and Joe Gould (Paul Giamatti) vibes with this character. Once again, he’s proven to me why he’s one of the best character actors in the business. I can’t wait to see him in something else in the near future.

Rachel Morrison is an Oscar-nominated cinematographer for Mudbound. She’s also done great work in Fruitvale Station and Dope, among others in her career. The Fire Inside is her directorial debut, though. I could tell she brought her experience as a cinematographer into her first directorial outing. There are numerous shots of backdrops of people walking or shots of the degradation that is going on in Flint, Michigan, at this time. This film takes place just before the water shortage crisis, but you can still feel the struggle and the difficulties this community is facing. She also shoots the boxing scenes very well. You feel like you’re a part of the fights by the way she circles the ring with the camera. It’s apparent she watched other boxing movies to get the right vibe for this story. I’m very excited about the next film she directs.

I felt that this story lacked a little bit more of the hard times that Destiny and Henry’s characters were going through as well as the community as a whole. The movie moves too fast through this young lady’s success story but doesn’t feature as much of her struggles in the first half of the film. The second half is what I was looking for. It was based on a true story so the scriptwriter is hamstrung with that story to turn into a good script and Jenkins relied on too many cliches of sports stories instead of making this an original story. He’s a good writer as film fans have seen from his work on Moonlight and so forth. I just had a little more grit and struggle along the way. It just seemed so easy for her at first and I know it couldn’t have been that easy in real life.

The Fire Inside is a good sports/boxing film, it’s just not great. It lacked the grit and struggle in the first half which took me out of the movie. The second half was what I wanted to see the whole way. The acting by Destiny was good, but Henry was the standout in a Supporting Role. He just has a knack for making whatever role he takes his own. Morrison as a director is good, but I still like her as a cinematographer better right now. Jenkins turned in a Subpar script that lacked the darker nature I was looking for for a film set in Flint, Michigan at this time. The movie as a whole seemed too glossy and clean for my liking. Even the main throughline was too perfectly set up. I need more from an underdog story. This one didn’t give me enough bang for my buck.

 3 stars

Dan Skip Allen