At a Toronto festival strangely heavy on middling dramas about either wrestlers (Unstoppable, uplifting yet routine) or boxers (The Cut, downbeat yet ridiculous), it’s easy to forget just how thrilling a combat sports movie can be when it’s done well. Back in 2015, Ryan Coogler’s transcendent Rocky reboot Creed was so overwhelmingly enjoyable that it not only refreshed a franchise but it awoke an entire genre. And while he retreated to producer for the two sequels, the franchise provided a new, updated blueprint on how to perfect a boxing story.
While his sometime cinematographer Rachel Morrison might not have worked with him on the Creed movies, it feels as if she’s used what she has learned from their working relationship (she shot Fruitvale Station and Black Panther) to help inform her directorial debut, electrifying true story drama The Fire Inside. Morrison made history a few years back becoming the first woman to ever receive an Oscar nomination for cinematography (still genuinely staggering that it took this long), and so she’s highly aware of what it takes to make her mark in a male-dominated field. One can see why she was then so taken with the story of Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, a young Black woman who fought her way from an impoverished home in Flint, Michigan, all the way to the 2012 Olympics, where she became the first US woman to ever win a gold medal for boxing at the age of just 17.
