Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Boxer’ on Netflix, a Polish Pugilism Film That Throws a Lot of Predictable Punches

Boxer (now on Netflix), in case you’re curious, is about a boxer. As in pugilist, not a dog. Just to be clear. And it’s absolutely in line with the Netflix Generic Title Initiative, which seems to be on quite a tear lately. I firmly expect to see movies called Funny Dog or Cartoon Adventure or Coming of Age or Fights ‘n’ Car Chases in the menus soon. And if you’re wondering if Boxer has a different title in its native language, let it be known that it’s a direct Polish translation of Bokser. Anyway, the film is from director Mitja Okorn, who helmed American YA romance Life in a Year, and stars Polish vet Eryk Kulm as the title athlete, and Adrianna Chlebicka (of the Squared Love rom-com trilogy on Netflix) as his wife. Now here’s hoping it transcends its title and gives us something more than the usual sports flick.

BOXER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The movie opens with a title card explaining how numerous people tried to escape communist Poland to pursue their dreams of being professional athletes, and the movie ends with another, essentially a tribute to all people who fled the country in the 1980s because the living conditions were so poor. This will lend an air of gravitas to a movie that doesn’t deserve it, I must report. Putting “this could have happened” in the title card text – as this film does – falls short of even the basic standards of a BOATS (Based On A True Story, of course) movie. In fact, the main character is less of a character than a collection of traits you’d expect a would-be/wannabe boxer to have, and comes off like an amalgamation of many such characters before him, in movies or in real life.

And that character is Jedrzej (Kulm). As a kid in the 1970s, he watched his father box, and hoped to emulate his Olympic potential. But Jedrzej watched as his old man lost a fight – a loss that smelled fishy, since the sport is ruled by gamblers and therefore full of palookas willing to eat canvas for a tidy payday. After his father dies, Jedrzej trains under his uncle Czesiek (Eryk Lubos), a sweetheart of a boozer who at this point I was pretty sure was destined to be the Beloved Coach Who Gets Replaced When The Protagonist Hits The Big Time, Making Everyone Sad. No spoilers, but when a movie looks like a duck and a movie quacks like a duck, it’s almost certainly a duck.

Jump to 1985. Jerdrzej is in the ring, getting his ass beat. It’s brutal. Blood all over the place. But then he summons an inner berserker rage and turns his opponent into a juicy bag of meat. He wins the Polish Championship and – well, that’s it. Maybe an Olympic bid. But that’s the ceiling in this crappy Eastern Bloc country. He meets a sweetheart of a woman named Kasia (Chlebicka) and kerpow, they get married real quick and start dreaming: He wants to go to London to box, and she could go to university there. Easier said than done, though. Under this regime, you can’t just up and vamoose. You have to suffer without enough food like everyone else, for the good of the country. 

But it’s not impossible. They elude the authorities and find their way over the border and head straight to London’s most prestigious boxing gym, where Jerdrzej boasts and makes demands and gets laughed outta there. He ends up in the company of a sleazoid who arranges a fight with a real contender, although Jerdrzej is gonna throw it, real dramatic in the final round, for a wad of dough. And he needs it, because Kasia is preggers. But what about pride? If he throws the fight, will Jerdrzej end up just like his father – a palooka in a pine box?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Cinderella Man, Creed, Rocky, Million Dollar Baby, The Fighter – same basic movie, different contexts. 

Performance Worth Watching: I genuinely liked the performances by Kulm and Chlebicka, who are likable, talented actors. They just don’t have the focused direction and screenplay they need to bring freshness to their roles.

Memorable Dialogue: Jerdrzej ends up training under a fellow immigrant, a Chinese man named Yu who’s learning some of the Polish language bit by bit: “First, Yu, f— you, and second, you say ‘pizda,’ not ‘wagina.’”

Sex and Skin: A couple of steamy sex scenes with topless females. 

Our Take: Welp, Boxer does not transcend its title and give us something more than the usual sports flick. It absolutely hits all the dramatic points you expect – and takes two-and-a-half hours to do so: humble beginnings, lotsa wide-eyed hope, some success, a climb to new economic strata, ego-induced conflicts, etc. And whenever Jerdrzej looks like he’s about to lose, he summons the beast within and punches and punches and punches and punches his way to victory. I think that’s a metaphor for life? Sort of? Well, a rather sloppy one, anyway, because there just isn’t much connective subtext here – the pre- and postscript frames Jerdrzej’s story as the tale of a man with nothing who escaped oppression in order to be something, but it becomes little more than a very loose cautionary tale about not losing sight of what’s important (family and the like) and forgetting where you come from while obsessively chasing your dreams. 

The framing device feels stapled on, like an afterthought, as if to give the story a little heft before it floats away on a raft of cliches. Tonally, it’s just as unfocused, wavering from the amiable, upbeat goofiness of a light comedy to overemotive strings-of-snot-and-drool melodrama. At times, it’s almost a tongue-in-cheek parody of ye olde sports film algorithm: The training montage set to CCR’s “Fortunate Son,” the inevitable out-of-control hedonism sequence (set to a flush-on-the-nose-like-a-punch version of “In the Pines”), the marital strife, the boxing sequences in which both fighters throw impossible flurries of haymakers like they’re in a video game. Meanwhile, somewhere in there, the Berlin Wall fell. Did any of these characters even notice? Eventually, I guess. 

Our Call: Not a knockout. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.