Uppercut movie review (2025)

October 4, 2025 Jeffrey Lyles Jordan E. Cooper, Luise Grossman, Torsten Ruether, Uppercut, Ving Rhames

Uppercut is a punch-drunk boxing movie flailing away trying to tell two stories instead of just getting one right.

Uppercut director/writer Torsten Ruether potentially has a solid movie on his hands, but it feels like he tried to make Rocky and Rocky V in 110 minutes.

The most frustrating aspect of Uppercut is the story has enough of a hook that a sequel taking a fast track to the future could have worked. Just not within the scope of one movie detailing the start of a boxer’s career.

Toni (Luise Grossman) is a young woman with dreams of becoming a boxer. She’s got heart and she’s got desire but lacks the skills and technique. That brings her to Elliott Duffond (Ving Rhames, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning), a renowned boxing trainer.

Elliott is leery of training someone else especially since he’s already sized up Toni and doesn’t think she’s got what it takes to succeed. The standard boxing movie formula would then be for Toni to win over the grizzled trainer with her passion and her tough upbringing.

She battles against the odds, endures some challenging training, maybe has a fight or two and wins a championship as the credits roll.
There’s not an abundance of boxing movies starring a female boxer so it’s still relatively unique.

Ruether opts for something different — not necessarily a bad strategy, but it’s the execution that’s rough. Fast forward eight years and Toni is now a fairly prestigious boxing promoter. She’s got a hotshot prospect, Payne Harris (Jordan E. Cooper), who swears he’s the next big thing.

Toni has a reputation of not being in her fighter’s corner during their matches. As Payne is battling, Toni is in the back room half focused on the fight and distracted by phone calls and texts.

Ruether’s script has too many starts and stops as if he can’t stay focused enough to pay off subplots or provide Uppercut some direction.

Rhames can play the wizened mentor figure in his sleep. While Uppercut doesn’t provide much to warrant his best performance, Rhames doesn’t mail it in either.

Grossman bears the brunt of the weak script as she’d asked to play Toni in two very different stages of her life. There’s just not enough for her to make Toni feel like a fully fleshed out character in the future segments particularly since Ruether never takes the time to explain how Toni became such a respected trailblazer.

That would be more than enough for a movie. Uppercut suffers from a director/screenwriter not truly seeing the compelling story he’s got in hand and instead tries a combo where nothing lands.

At several points through Uppercut, it feels like Ruether was more preoccupied with making music videos instead of a movie. The score is far more annoying and distracting than aiding to the film.

Uppercut has a barebones script and wasting valuable minutes with pointless montages continually wrecks any potential plot advancement.

It seems like Toni the promoter is the more engaging plot in Uppercut with Payne having some of the same gripes Toni did while Elliott trained her. Ruether wants to show how Toni’s past influenced her present more as a concept than actually delivering that at any point in Uppercut.

There’s was a better movie here — maybe two — but in its current state Uppercut isn’t even a contender.