Christy (2025) Review
This week’s Cinemark Secret Screening was Christy. A boxing biopic about the rise of Christy Salter starring Sydney Sweeney. What did I think about the film? Let’s talk about it!
The Good
Right out of the gate, the thing to talk about with this film is that this is a wild true story that’s a lot crazier than I thought it was going to be. This was a fun movie to see with a packed theater because there’s multiple moments all throughout the film that had my audience cringy, cheering, and gasping because of how shocking and wild this film gets. I know it’s a coincidence but Sydney Sweeney had two different movies released in 2025 that are based on true stories that are wild and I wanted to see how much of it was real. These are the types of biopics that interest me the most, the films that are so much wilder than I thought. Because it’s such a wild movie with multiple “WTF” moments in the film, it made for a very lively viewing experience with people of different genders and ages in my theater. I’ve gone to several Cinemark Secret Screenings this year and this is the liveliest crowd I’ve seen a film with.
Another thing you have to talk about here is Sydney Sweeney and this is the best performance I’ve seen from her. I haven’t seen Euphoria or any of the tv shows she’s done. She clearly went to the gym and trained for months to prepare for this role and she does a great job. A debate I’ve seen on social media is whether or not she’ll get an Oscar nomination. I think there’s a lot of competition and I’m not sure how much of a ripple this movie will make this award season. We’ll see what happens, I think she does a lot of good in here that warrant an Oscar nomination but we’ll see what happens. She’s having to play Christy at various stages of her life where we meet her when she’s in high school in 2010. Through that she’s dealing with a toxic relationship, being in the LGBTQ community, being rejected by men in the boxing world, and so much more. She needs to do a lot in this film to make it believable and she’s 100% up to doing son and you believe it. The other one that people aren’t talking about as much but I think deserves to be in the competition this award season is Ben Foster as Christy’s husband. He’s in so much makeup and prosthetics that I didn’t recognize that it was him until the credits. He’s so good in this movie at playing this husband that’s so abusive, mean, and creepy. His actions and what he does in the movie is one of the big aspects that kept on getting a reaction from my audience. It’s such a good performance that will be one of the best and most memorable performances of 2025.
As far as David Michôd’s direction, he does a really good job of balancing all of this and making it feel like one movie despite there being some pretty big shifts in tone in the back half of the film. The first half of the film plays like a pretty traditional tried and true inspirational sports movie that I was thinking “this is a feel good movie, that’s uplifting and inspiring” and then the third act happens and things get wild and the film changes from an uplifting sports movie to almost feeling like a horror movie. If you’ve seen the film, then you probably know what I’m talking about. I thought that the tonal change actually added a lot of the film’s value and uniqueness. The first 70% of the film is good but it follows a pretty straightforward by the numbers predictable sports movie about the underdog. When the film transitions into something very different and something that I wasn’t expecting, I appreciated that about the film and that it subverted expectations. I’ve seen some people on Twitter say that the change in tone is actually what hurt the film for them. There’s a sense in which I get that, because it is quite the change but I just didn’t feel that way about the film.
Finally, one thing that I feel all great sports movies have in common is they have great soundtracks. Remember the Titans is my favorite sports movie of all time and that film has a great soundtrack. Some of the Rocky movies have great soundtracks. Christy has another great soundtrack that gets you pumped up and they play at all of the right moments. It’s popular songs that you’ve heard before but it’s not the obvious songs you’d think to play in a movie and that’s when you have a great soundtrack.
The Bad
The big thing here is that I feel the makeup and hairstyling of the film is very distracting and could’ve been better. For a majority of the film it’s very obvious that Sydney Sweeney is wearing a black haired wig. Maybe it’s that we’re all so used to seeing her with blonde hair that seeing her with different hair is distracting. But it’s not some of the strongest makeup of the year and I think that might hurt Sydney’s chances at award season because it’s hurting how much she can disappear into the role. When the film starts, it takes place in 1989 where Christy Martin is supposed to be 21 years old. The final moments of the film take place in 2010 where she’s 42 years old. 42 isn’t old by any means but when you’re having an actress that’s 28 years old playing somebody 14 years older you need to do some sort of makeup to make her look a little bit older. If it wasn’t for the numbers appearing in big letters on the screen, I wouldn’t have guessed that she was 42 years old in the final scenes of the film. That part was a bit distracting and I wish they transformed Sydney more into looking older, but they didn’t.
Another thing here is that I found Christy’s mother in the film to be the worst written and acted character in the film. In the film she’s designed to be the member of the family that you hate the most and the film does a great job of portraying that. But I felt like the film didn’t really touch on those ideas as deep as I feel they could’ve. It felt like all of the other characters were written more complicated with layers, but her character didn’t get that same treatment and I’m not sure why. Even the performance by Merritt Wever I didn’t think was very good. She’s playing a very stereotypical southern mother from this time period, because the writing was weak there wasn’t much in her performance that she got to dive deep into and do.
Finally, the film is a bit overly long and has a little bit of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King style ending. There’s several points in the film where I thought “ok this is the final scene” but it wasn’t and kept on going. All of the scenes were good, I’m not suggesting they cut any of them, but they still made the movie feel overly long. The film is 2 hours and 15 minutes long and I think there’s a version of this film that could’ve been trimmed by 10-15, tightening it up a little bit.
Final Thoughts: Christy is a very interesting and engaging biopic that does follow the formula but also goes in directions I wasn’t expecting and the film is able to change tones very seamlessly. Sydney Sweeney delivers a great performance, she proves that she’s more than just a pretty face and can actually act. Ben Foster is also great here and I hope he gets the awards recognition that I think he deserves. It’s not great, it’s not one of the best biopics of all time. But it’s a very solid one that my audience was eating up and engaged in from beginning to end.
The Score: 8.3/10 (B)
Comments