Fighting With My Family

Dir: Stephen Merchant

2019

**

As the age old saying states ‘You can’t polish a turd’, but you can cover it in sugar and convince people it is edible it seems. Back in 2012, Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson was in the UK filming Fast & Furious 6. After a hard day of flexing his muscles and wrestling Luke Evens, he retired back to his hotel room and flicked the telly on to see what crap us Brits like to watch of an evening. As it happened, the former wrestler found a show about wrestling called The Wrestlers: Fighting with My Family. The show was a one-off documentary about a family of four (Mum, Dad, Son, Daughter) who traveled round the country putting on wrestling shows in working men’s clubs. Mum Julia "Sweet Saraya" Knight was once homeless and ‘in a bad way’ when she met armed robber and wrestling fanatic Patrick "Rowdy Ricky" Knight. The pair believe their love for each other and their shared love of wrestling is what saved them as people and once their kids were old enough to pick each other up, they formed a four person show where they would fight each other. I’m not a wrestling fan but I certainly see the appeal of the story, especially as the daughter, Saraya "Paige" Knight, became a professional wrestler for WWE. It’s a great underdog story featuring an unlikely family. An entertaining documentary. Johnson certainly thought so, so much in fact, that he got in contact with Stephen Merchant, with whom he made Tooth Fairy with a couple of years before, to write a script about the family and to develop their story for the big screen. The only rule it seems was to not let fact get in the way. The film starts with a flashback to 2002, where, in the English City of Norwich, we see 12-year-old Zak Bevis as he is engrossed by the WWF (now WWE) King of the Ring pay-per-view event until his younger sister Saraya changes the channel to her favorite program, Charmed. The siblings wrestle, urged on by their parents Rick (Nick Frost) and Julia (Lena Headey). Rick books the children for their first wrestling match where Saraya, initially reluctant to wrestle a boy, goes on to win as planned. Fast-forward to the present day, at age 18, and competing under the ring name “Britani Knight”, Saraya (Florence Pugh) and her brother “Zak Zodiac” (Jack Lowden) help their parents train prospective wrestlers while working toward their own promotion. Rick and Julia, struggling financially, ask WWE trainer Hutch Morgan (Vince Vaughn) to sign the siblings. He finally agrees to a tryout before a SmackDown taping at The O2 Arena, and tells Saraya to find a different name as they "already have a Britani". The siblings end up bumping into Dwayne Johnson (who plays himself) and beg him for advice. Saraya decides to adopt the name Paige from her favorite character on Charmed. The two try out with several other wrestlers and are all belittled by Morgan. He ultimately chooses Paige over the rest, despite her attempt to have Zak signed as well. With her brother’s encouragement, Paige leaves for America while Zak continues wrestling on the British independent circuit, assisting his parents’ wrestling school, and tending to his girlfriend and newborn son. Arriving at NXT in Florida, Paige has difficulty adjusting to the WWE style of entertainment – chiefly, the inexperience of her fellow female trainees Jeri-Lynn, Kirsten, & Maddison who are all models with no wrestling experience. Paige struggles with performing promos and Morgan’s constant belittlement. Morgan makes it clear to Zak that he will never be signed to WWE, and Zak falls into a depression. Paige discovers her parents are selling merchandise of her likeness without her permission and have booked her in a match against Zak scheduled for her Christmas break. At an NXT live event and her in-ring debut, Paige is heckled by the crowd and freezes up, leaving the ring in tears. She decides to bleach her hair blonde and spray tan to look more like her fellow trainees, which only causes more friction between them. After failing an obstacle course, Paige lashes out at the trainees for gossiping about her when they were actually discussing Kirsten, who has been away from her daughter in order to give her a better life. Morgan tells Paige that her brother’s future in WWE would only have been as enhancement talent and signing would have ruined his life, implying that it did the same to him. Morgan encourages Paige to quit and return to her family for a happier life. She travels home for the Christmas break. Just before the match against her brother, Paige tells Zak she is leaving WWE. Angry that she is giving up the dream he failed to achieve himself, Zak goes off-script, defeats Paige and then tells their parents her plans to quit, devastating Ricky. After the family find Zak in a drunken bar fight, Paige admits that Morgan declined to sign Zak to protect him and he needs to focus on what is important in life; his family and coaching children who look up to him. Paige changes her mind after Zak berates her for giving up on their shared dream, and she returns to Florida, resuming her original hair color and skin tone. She drastically improves in training, befriending and encouraging her fellow trainees. Zak returns to training his parents’ students, including a blind boy. Morgan brings the trainees to WrestleMania XXX, where Paige is booked in a suite with The Rock and learns she will make her Raw debut the following night against WWE Divas Champion AJ Lee, as recommended by Morgan. Paige makes her Raw debut and again freezes up, but Lee starts the match and unexpectedly puts the Divas Championship on the line. With her family watching on TV, Paige wins the match and the title, finally comfortable enough to say a promo, "This is MY house!". An epilogue explains that Paige remains the youngest Divas Champion and was an early leader in the ongoing Women's Revolution, that one of Zak's trainees, who was blind, became a wrestler, and pokes fun at The Rock's movie career and Rick selling shares in the family business. The closing credits include footage from the family’s 2012 documentary and Paige’s debut match. While I understand certain truths had to be omitted for a 90 minute film, I do find the sugar-coating of the family rather questionable. My mate at work is obsessed with wrestling and he tells me that the family are not a nice bunch. Making them family-friendly for a big WWE Studio film is faker than any wrestling match – and that brings me to my biggest gripe. Early on in the film, when Zak is introducing his family to his girlfriends well-to-do parents (the dad played by Stephen Merchant), it is explained to the non-wrestling fans that the sport isn’t ‘fake’, rather it is fixed, that is, the wrestling moves are choreographed and the outcome is decided before the match but the wrestling is essentially real. So, even after explaining how it works, its strange that the last scene tries to convince the audience that Paige somehow didn’t know she was going to win her first official fight and that she won it as a boxer would win a boxing match. Also, even as someone who knows nothing about wrestling, I know that you can go from passing training to fighting in a championship final just like that. I wasn’t expecting a modern masterpiece from WWE Studios but I thought they would at least keep the wrestling element of the story true. In conclusion, I find Johnson’s enthusiasm misplaced and Merchant’s involvement ill-suited. It’s basically nice people portraying nasty people as nice people. It’s not for me but credit it to Pugh and Lowden who are both convincing in their roles.