The Boxer Review

Jim Sheridan builds this one around a body. Danny Flynn comes out of fourteen years in prison lean and slightly wrong, and Day-Lewis, who trained for three years with Barry McGuigan, moves like a man whose only surviving fluency is in the ring. The fights are shot close and unshowy, no slow motion, no operatic blood, and one bout in London is allowed to be grinding and ugly in a way boxing films rarely permit.

Belfast during the ceasefire is drawn with the same specificity, the bonfires, the murals, the way Gerard McSorley's hardliner can shut a gym down without raising his voice. Brian Cox plays the exhausted negotiator with a stillness that holds the whole political thread together. The romance is the failure. Emily Watson is a serious actress handed almost nothing: Maggie exists as a prisoner's wife, a woman the community polices, and the script never gives her an appetite or an argument of her own, so the central relationship is asserted rather than earned.

The last act tidies its politics into a chase and a rescue when the film had set up something harder to resolve. The gym itself, non sectarian by rule and therefore a provocation, remains the best idea in it.