In “The Queen of the Ring,” an overlong sports drama based on a true story, Mildred Burke (Emily Bett Rickards) is a waitress in the 1930s aspiring to something more. She overcomes the odds to become a champion wrestler in an era when American women were largely confined to cooking and cleaning. It’s a middling entry into the biographical sports movie genre, and the director, Ash Avildsen, cannot resist pummeling his audience with a simplistic girl-power message.
Rather randomly, Mildred stumbles upon a wrestling match in Kansas City and proclaims the sport her destiny. The story continues chronologically, tracking Mildred and her manager turned husband Billy Wolfe (Josh Lucas) as they graduate from circus sideshows to professional matches to national renown.
The screenplay, featuring dialogue exchanged in varying degrees of Southern drawls, is stuffed with spunky speeches about wrestling being a boys club. These moments amplify drama, but the script’s greater feat is a quiet attention to how women flocked to wrestling for its performative possibilities. It posits that “lady wrestlers,” as they called themselves, saw the ring as a stage, and the sport as an escape from dull domesticity.
In its plot-heavy second half, “The Queen of the Ring” loses coherence when it speeds through a storyline about rival women’s leagues and sidelines characters it had only recently introduced. The muddle causes any sincere emotion to turn into schlock. One senses that Avildsen was desperate to pack an emotional punch, but he could have pulled a few instead.
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