We Didn’t Start the Fire | The Fire Inside (2024) Movie Review | #OscarsHomework
A Perfectly-Pitched & -Paced bioPic 🤳
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I found The Fire Inside — originally titled Flint Strong, which is both a more appropriate title for the material and an inarguably worse title for marketing poirposes 🐬 — to be the epitome of what a biopic can be. Which is to say, I don’t find the art form especially compelling (A Complete Unknown was a huge miss for me), but to the extent biopics can be effective vehicles for storytelling, this film does it as well as it perhaps can be done.
I’m an absolute sucker for boxing movies. Rocky is a classic; I even enjoy your Cinderellas Man, your Millions Dollar Baby. Boxing is just a rich subject matter for good narrative, not least when it is a real boxer’s story.
And what a story.
Claressa “T-Rex” Shields (who charmingly goes by ClaressaTheGWOATShields on Insta) is perhaps the most successful, decorated boxer in the history of the sport. As we learn from the end credits title cards, Ressa would go on to hold 15 belts in five different weight classes, and her Wikipedia page is a long, long list of firsts she has achieved in her sporting career.
The entire film is a polished and competent, relatively-tight retelling of real events, starting with Ressa’s training and eventual victory at the 2012 and 2016 Olympics, including pioneering better compensation for women athletes.
Ressa is portrayed by Ryan Destiny in a virtuosic performance that will surely net some awards-season buzz. Ditto Brian Tyree Henry, who is afforded the opportunity to flex his dramatic muscles (not that he hasn’t before), and I’m reminded of what Chase Hutchinson of Collider said of Henry’s run on Atlanta, writing: “Uniting [Atlanta] is the irreplaceable Henry’s sense of presence and vulnerability he conveys as an actor, an element of the show that would not be the same without him. It makes him one of the best parts of the series and one of the best actors working today for all he manages to do in even the simplest of moments.” [emphasis mine]
Spot on. Henry brings that same energy to his performance in this film, in which he does a great deal with what — on the page — might not seem like all that much.
It’s also a gratifying, and not-that-common experience to see so many named characters with speaking roles played by so many people of color, and I don’t think there’s a performance in this film that isn’t a credit to both the performer and director. A triumph of casting, and Ressa seems to agree, given her full-throated support for the film and promotional efforts on behalf of it.
I had roughly the opposite response or reaction to The Fire Inside that I did to A Complete Unknown, and I saw them on back-to-back days. They’re essentially the same assignment, and an assignment both filmmakers understood, but one is in service of one of the most incredible, true, sporting stories ever told and the other is a 2.5-hour dramatization of a boring breach-of-contract case, exacerbated by the introversion and misanthropy of its protagonist.
One is easy for me to root for and one is impossible for me to root for, and for me, that made all the difference in the world.
