They say an artist has only one story to tell, and throughout their lifetime, they keep telling different versions of it over and over again. While I have never been in agreement with this fallacy, Torsten Ruether’s “Uppercut” makes me wanna reconsider. Following Ving Rhames as Elliott Duffond on one fateful night of talking to the ambitious Toni Williams, played by Luise Großmann, the film suffers greatly from an inability to pinpoint the mark it wants to hit. For a boxing drama that is supposed to be nothing more than offering a few simplistic ‘fighting for yourself’ lessons, the overall stretch that the film takes in order to make no point whatsoever makes it frustratingly inept.
It all plays out in two parallel timelines that director Ruether wants you to believe have some sort of connection to each other. In one of the timelines, Toni Williams is a hotshot manager to Payne Harris (Jordan E. Cooper), a young boxer who needs to be gaslighted in order to win a fight for some reason. She wears a pantsuit, has a stylish hairstyle, but is somehow trapped within her own enigmas – she fails to be on the side of her fighter, watching the game away from the ring; taking calls from her partner about how to handle their ailing child.
In the other timelines, which takes place 8 years before the fight, Toni has just been let go from her job as a trainer. She is seen walking around New York City, reflecting on how her life should pan out. Somehow, she decides to walk into a gym after hours, thanks to a tip from a frien,d and meets Rhames’ Elliot, an ex-boxer who had to hang up his gloves due to a serious injury that still haunts him literally and metaphorically. On paper, Elliot is written like one of those boxing cliches that were popularized by the Rocky films. However, Rhames, who is the only redeeming quality to this mostly dead-on-arrival drama, raises it beyond what it is capable of.
His magnetic screen presence, despite a lack of substance or direction, makes “Uppercut” a somewhat bearable film. The other things that do not work for it are Luise Großmann’s dreary turn as Toni Williams. Director Ruether is neither able to give her a screen character that has some sort of drive to understand the sport, nor is he able to bring the arc of her eventually becoming a successful manager with gravitas together.
If you dig deep enough, you will understand why this is such a poorly arranged presentation. For one, the film is a remake of the German film “Leberhaken” that also starred Großmann. Secondly, the 2025 film is essentially a two-parter just edited into one. If you go digging into IMDb, you will know that the film was intended as a two-parter “Uppercut: The Still Version” and “Uppercut: The Sparkling Version” that had both the timelines shot separately. Lionsgate released the two parts by mashing some of Toni’s angst, anger, and resentment towards life, being handed something down, being her apparent driving force to learn boxing, with her failure to do something for herself.
The result is a talky, frustratingly inept boxing drama that begins with a promise of leaving you with something substantial, but never does.
Read More: Uppercut (2025) Movie Ending Explained: Did Payne Harris Win the Bout?
Uppercut (2025) Movie Links: IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, Letterboxd
Uppercut (2025) Movie Cast: Ving Rhames, Luise Grossmann, Jordan E. Cooper, Joanna Cassidy, Scott Monahan, Andrew Ibach, Lynn Favin, Jaime Wallace, Manny Ayala, Fermin Padilla III, Biko Eisen-Martin, Cedric Brandon Jones, Victor Plajas, Charles T. Massey
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