So the film itself blocks out the peripheral noise – nearly eliminating the other characters – to let Jackie concentrate on her own reckoning. This is authentic in a way, even if it doesn’t make for natural entertainment. But in Bruised, there comes a point when Jackie even admits that she has no choice but to do it on her own, without any help or distractions. The loneliness and selfishness of such protagonists are often eschewed in favour of cinematic circularity: romance, parenthood, adulthood. At first, I thought maybe this is a novel way to approach the lone-wolf film. It doesn’t help that, in the buildup to the fight, the other crutches of the story – the son, the lover – conveniently disappear for a while (like the brothers’ father, played by Nick Nolte, did in Warrior during their title bout).
Her muscles, though, can’t carry a film that’s aching to be admired for its workout schedule. The action in the ring doesn’t look all that convincing either – what with the dramatically familiar rhythm of the fight – even if Halle Berry looks to be training like a proper athlete. Somewhere along the way, Jackie trains, stumbles and builds herself back to championship form for a climactic title bout whose resolution is so predictable that Rocky would call the cops. Have I missed anything? I think that’s everything. Jackie also has a sarcastic, semi-estranged mother with a substance abuse problem. (You just know that he’ll say that elusive word in the end, don’t you?). Driving home the manicured darkness of Jackie’s journey is the fact that her kid Manny does not speak – not a word – due to some deep-set trauma. The “how” goes exactly how one might imagine: Jackie is noticed in an unsanctioned basement brawl by a founder of a flashy tournament she is given a second shot out of nowhere she finds her son Manny sitting at her doorstep in the rain she bonds with Manny by protecting him from her toxic manager-cum-boyfriend she bonds with her new trainer, a serene lesbian named Bobbi ‘Buddhakan’ (Sheila Atim), through her single-mother spirit.
Now that you’ve read the premise, visualise it based on every boxing/martial arts/generic sports movie you’ve ever seen and you’d be dead right.
Thus begins a game of musical chairs between her personal struggles and professional comeback.
She plays a disgraced MMA fighter named Jackie Justice, who is hit with the abrupt arrival of a previously adopted six-year-old son just as she’s planning a return to the ring. The problem is the sheer number of gritty-critical-acclaim tropes packed into a single film, as though this were Berry’s only chance to get behind the camera. The simplistic gender reversal of its sports-as-redemption template means that Bruised is an all-out showcase for Halle Berry – as both, an actress aiming for a second Oscar and a first-time filmmaker trying to make a statement. There is not a frame in Bruised we haven’t seen before. The agony of Bruised is so apparent that Million Dollar Baby could be the DJ of this pity party. It’s all there: a physically demanding role, a veteran performer’s directorial debut, Black America, a gloomy visual palette, a graphic sex scene, a queer arc, a history of abuse, a mute child, and most of all, a brutal sport in which athletes break and bleed the most. Bruised is the epitome of this culturally precise formula. No narrative cliche is spared in pursuit of guilting the average white voter into submission. They play on the age-old misconception about great filmmaking: that the suffering needs to be visible. Some of them are made with an eye on juries that are inclined towards destitution porn – and an Academy who rewards art that sweats the hardest. At the end of every year, you can almost smell the desperation of films angling for Oscar nods.