It’s so clear from the advertising that Fighting With My Family is going to be in part a commercial for World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE for short). That’s usually a giant red flag, because you’re not going to get anything but beautiful rose-colored views of life in the wrestling world. I think the WWE might know this too, because it hired Stephen Merchant to write the script for its movie. Another smart move is not making the movie about the WWE, but about a family that wants to be a part of it.
That family is the Knight family. Ricky (Nick Frost) and Julia (Lena Headey) run the WAW company out of Norwich, in eastern England. Their events featured two of their kids, Zak (Jack Lowden) and Saraya (Florence Pugh), who become local stars. After repeated attempts to enter the WWE, their calling comes in the form of Hutch (Vince Vaughn), a recruiter who works them out in London. Hutch agrees to take Saraya, now known in the ring as Paige, to Florida to be part of the minor leagues of wrestling…but he does not invite Zak as well, potentially wreaking havoc on Zak, Paige, and her family.
It’s clear Stephen Merchant was given like 2 or 3 monologues from the WWE that he had to say and inorganically work into the script about the WWE or NXT. However, the best selling job Merchant does for wrestling is how hard clearly all these people work to be there. Sure the women in NXT can appear on the outside to be bikini clad models, cheerleaders, and general bombshells, but those beautiful women are also mothers and REALLY in shape, putting their bodies on the line week after week while sacrificing their personal lives. Merchant does as much digging as he can into how complicated that relationship is in NXT, with all these people competing to be pulled up to the big leagues while also trying to help each other and work together to make each other look good.
But the title of the movie is Fighting with my FAMILY, and Paige’s family is a perfect cinematic one. The opening 30 minutes or so are set the stage for a really fun movie, with Zak and Saraya rallying the misfits of their town, including a blind kid, to the gym where instead of selling drugs they help get these kids in shape and give them some purpose. This is really funny, but also helps set up the bond between Zak and Saraya and how close they are to each other an their parents. Nick Frost and Lena Headey have a blast playing the wacky wrestling parents of Paige, plunging head first into the sport and taking everything so seriously for real life reasons that anyone who questions it gets an abrasive attitude back. They’re so good that the movie suffers a bit when it leaves Norwich for Florida. As compelling as Paige’s ascent is, Zak’s dream falling apart is MUCH more emotionally compelling material. The week Paige returns home is more compelling than anything that happens to her in the ring, with Florence Pugh and Jack Lowden selling the rift that has developed between the two of them so well you wish the movie spent more time exploring it.
The big winners of Fighting With My Family are not the WWE, but the WAW of Norwich, and Florence Pugh. Expect big things from Pugh, who’s had a really nice run over the last year or so? She’s Robert The Bruce’s wife in a Netflix movie, and the star of a really tense, good miniseries. And now she can wrestle? I hope she continues her Paige like ascendance into super stardom.