By Jason Osiason

Christy tries to punch its way into greatness. It has the ingredients for a knockout, a true story of survival, a star trying to prove range, and a director clearly aiming for prestige, but the film never finds the rhythm between grit and grace. Sydney Sweeney plays Christy Martin, the West Virginia fighter who broke barriers in women’s boxing, and she’s halfway there. You can feel the work she’s putting in, the physicality, the accent, the bruised determination. But there are moments where it plays more like dress-up than transformation. She’s good, sometimes very good, but not quite lived-in yet.

Ben Foster, as Christy’s abusive husband and trainer Jim, goes for operatic menace. He’s all veins and fury, glowering and shouting his way through every scene. It’s a performance so big it starts to swallow the movie. The dynamic between them is meant to be tragic, but it sometimes edges toward unintentional humor not because the abuse is funny, but because the tone is confused. The film flirts with the kind of glossy excess that might have turned it into Ryan Murphy territory but never commits that far. It wants to be raw and human, not camp, yet its intensity often tips into something you almost laugh at just to release the tension.

The fights are solid, if a little stiff. The montages land with decent energy, but the filmmaking never lets you feel Christy’s craft or skill. It’s more highlight reel than immersion. What does work is the sheer absurdity of the boxing world around her: the macho bluster, the showbiz shine moments where you can sense the filmmakers trying to inject humor through the ridiculousness of it all. There’s a strange charm in watching Sweeney’s Christy play up the bravado, glittered and bloodied, like she knows she’s performing toughness for an audience that doesn’t quite believe her yet.

Then comes the ending. And my god, the ending. It’s brutal, but not in the way you expect. It’s so overcranked, so determined to parallel the real-life tragedy, that it circles back into something almost surreal. You’re horrified and weirdly amused at the same time, like the film is trying to make high art out of tabloid violence. It isn’t trashy, and it isn’t camp, but it’s definitely silly in its own self-seriousness. The emotional hit gets buried under how staged it feels. You leave dazed, wondering if you were supposed to be moved or just exhausted.

Still, Sweeney gives it her all. She’s magnetic in flashes, especially in the quieter aftermath scenes, when the bravado falls away and she just looks lost. The film itself isn’t trashy or exploitative, it’s too cautious for that, but it’s also not bold enough to match the chaos of Christy Martin’s real story.

Christy is half knockout, half stumble. Earnest, brutal, sometimes unintentionally funny, and never as daring as it thinks it is. You can’t look away, even when you’re not sure what tone it’s going for. [B-]