Standing8 (2015)
Abdul was raised to fight and win; but when he kills an opponent in the ring chasing the title, he must confront his greatest enemy - himself.
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Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!
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A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.
It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review
In Standing8 a boxer struggles to cope with the impact of him having killed his previous opponent in the ring. In this way the film does tread the ground you expect it to, and it does so in a pretty engaging and satisfying manner. Quick edits to the fight are combined with solid drama which is played well along genre lines. The film seems to focus very much on CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy) which is the degenerative disease found in people with repeated brain trauma, and this level of detail does add to the realism of the piece in some ways, with use of experts informing the detail of the film. This is a double-edged sword though, because the same focus on CTE specifically takes the film away from the character we had been following, and makes it feel more like a PSA perhaps.It is still delivered with style and professionalism, and it is this that does help carry it but it doesn't totally get over that break into being informative in the final third. Hill is good in the film, and he helps make the dramatic sections work. He is a good actor and gets to show a bit of it here – which is good considering how infrequently his main work on Elementary gives him that room to act out of his character a bit. Still, even with him and the style, the film does have that PSA feeling towards the end, when it needed to integrate that better into the more general dramatic flow.