Prizefighter: The Life of Jem Belcher

8/16/2022

Matt Hookings isn't very convincing here in this rather sketchy biopic of British boxer Jeb Belcher. On the plus side, it conveys really well the gritty side of life in Victorian Britain where the genteel, ostensibly refined, upper class routinely used the travails of the working class as a source of entertainment. This young lad finds himself trained in the school of hard knocks by Russell Crowe's "Slack" whilst being fairly shamelessly manipulated by the clever "Lord Rushworth" (an overly hammy Marton Csokas). The narrative tries quite hard to offer us a plausible series of scenarios as the young man rises from obscurity, but the production is not good. It has a "digital" look to it; there is little authentic about the style and though there is a modest amount of pugilism contained, the