It’s not hard to understand why Killian Maddox (Jonathan Majors) has anger issues. He’s working a low-paid job, living with and caring for his ailing grandfather, enduring micro- and macro-aggressions as a Black man in America and as he explains to a court-appointed therapist in the opening scene, he’s trapped in one of the country’s many food deserts, raging at a system that forces working-class people to eat themselves to death. And then there’s his primary passion …
Killian is an amateur bodybuilder, pushing his body to extremes in order to do something that he can be remembered by, something to be respected for, a way to separate himself from the trail of violence left behind by his late father. So he lifts and eats and lifts and injects and lifts and competes and lifts and punishes himself in order to ultimately be rewarded.
