Why is there so little ring-craft in boxing movies, asks Rudraneil Sengupta

I judge boxing movies by the authenticity of the fight and training scenes. If the whole film is about a certain sport, you need to get the sport right, right? Should that not be a basic requirement?

Imagine making a movie about a pianist, but getting all the piano-playing imagery wrong. The technicalities must come first, then the storytelling, dialogue, acting, script. Why pick boxing? Simply because more movies are made on this than on any other sport.

And yet boxing movies, no matter how iconic, rarely get it right. For reasons I would love to know more about, most fight scenes are reduced to two fighters hitting each other in the face for prolonged periods of time. In the real world, this could simply never happen (if it did, the referee would stop the fight).

In boxing, getting to punch your opponent’s face even once is a hard-earned prize. It’s what you work towards in all your years of training, a reflection of your skill, your ring-craft.

With all due respect, the fight scenes in the Rocky films would only work in a Groucho Marx comedy. Sylvester Stallone’s Balboa more or less walks into every punch thrown at him like a pub brawler blinded by drink. I wonder if anyone who follows boxing with any interest can sit through those scenes without feeling silly (at best) or deeply embarrassed (at worst).

Even the most iconic sequences get it wrong. In the first film, Balboa sprints up the 72 steps leading up to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, to the tune of Eye of the Tiger, a scene now part of cinematic folklore. Later in that montage, he trains by punching frozen carcasses in a slaughterhouse. In no sane world would that ever happen. A boxer’s fists are everything. Risking a hand injury by pounding frozen meat would be unimaginable. Boxers put their hands in Epsom baths and moisturise regularly. They keep their nails trimmed. They really have quite lovely hands. They certainly don’t batter icy carcasses.

Let’s jump forward many decades to the 2015 film Southpaw. Despite a wonderful caste — a crazily ripped Jake Gyllenhaal, the always fierce Forest Whitaker, Rachel McAdams, 50 Cent — it’s a terrible movie let down by poor writing and direction. But it prided itself on its fight and training scenes. Forget about it. Like Balboa, Gyllenhaal’s Billy Hope goes into the ring with the philosophy that the best way to stop a punch is with your face. In another laughable training sequence, he learns to lift and roll his shoulder to protect his face — something boxers learn as beginners — after he has already become a world champion.

The greatest boxing movie ever made also has utterly unrealistic fight sequences, but they serve a very specific artistic purpose. I’m talking about Raging Bull (1980). Robert De Niro’s Jake LaMotta just gets hit in the face repeatedly. But here, the hallucinatory violence, the lack of even the pretence of sporting skill, the terrifying destructive frenzy are all employed to bring out the inner violence, the guilt and pain and suffering of the protagonist. The fight scenes are not aiming for realism at all; instead, they are a lesson in the abstract.

Is there then a boxing movie that pays respectable homage to the skills of a fighter? Yes. Funnily enough, it comes from the Rocky stable. The 2015 film Creed features thrillingly realistic fight sequences (it’s also an excellent film). Michael B Jordan, a fiery actor, is superbly convincing as a boxer. The fighters he faces in the ring are all real boxers of great pedigree.

There is a choreographed feel to the fights, of course. But they’re staged to highlight actual technique — the subtle and quick movements to sway away from jabs, the footwork to move in and out and sideways to get positional advantage, the kinetic grace of a punch where the power moves from the toes, through the hips, rotates through the torso and travels through the shoulders and into the fist.

It takes years to learn how to do that. It’s nice when a film gets it right.