“Queen of the Ring” starts in the middle of a wrestling match, as an athlete musters all their determination to take control of a pivotal career match-up. The film then goes into flashback to tell the story of said athlete, Mildred Burke (Emily Bett Rickards), a female pioneer in the male-dominated professional wrestling world. Writer and director Ash Avildsen tries to show Burke’s life as a historical epic of triumph and perseverance, but he neglects to infuse it with credible dialogue or stylistic specificity.
Spanning two decades in Burke’s life, from her start in the 1930s to that aforementioned championship title in the 1950s, “Queen of the Ring” has a lot of story to cover. Avildsen, working from Jeff Leen’s book of the same name, goes about it doggedly, but with no finesse nor flair. His script is the type where characters are introduced by their full names so that the audience can fill in the historical context. The script sounds like it was written with underlines for emphasis and no subtlety. There are announcements and proclamations galore and never just dialogue between real people talking. The film vacillates between long scenes of wrestling fights and crucial events in Burke’s life, resorting to montages to fill in the years between.
The audience meets Burke when she’s a single mother working as a waitress in her mother’s (Cara Buono) hamburger joint. She dreams of becoming an entertainer; as a self-professed failure in song and dance, she turns to wrestling. At a time when women were not allowed to wrestle professionally, this dream seems far-fetched, but Burke is determined to succeed.
Her career jumpstarts when she convinces promoter Billy Wolfe (Josh Lucas) to train her. Soon she and Wolfe are a couple and they are touring carnivals with his adult son G. Bill (Tyler Posey), making Burke a star and building a female-wrestling league. This dysfunctional makeshift family also includes other women in the ring (among them Francesca Eastwood, Deborah Ann Woll, Marie Avgeropoulos and Kelli Berglund). The film explains how wrestling matches are just entertainment; their outcome is almost always determined beforehand. And so Burke needs to be surrounded by friendly antagonists who can help craft a narrative and sell it to an audience.
Burke’s personal relationship with Wolfe soon sours; he’s a philanderer and domestic abuser. However she’s forced to stay married to him as he controls their business partnership. Things get more complicated when it becomes apparent that the younger Wolfe might be the man to mend her broken heart. Nonetheless, she continues from triumph to triumph, building an empire with Wolfe and dragging her family up from abject poverty. When an impasse is reached and Burke has to start over almost from nothing, there’s never any doubt she’s capable of rising up again.
Avildsen attempts to present this as a galvanizing story of a hero. However, despite the time frame in which it’s set, there’s nary a mention of the socio-economic history of that era. Burke is presented as poor but the Great Depression is never mentioned, nor World War II. The only historical reference is to civil rights, to add more righteousness to Burke by presenting her as a trailblazer who opened her league to African American women. This could all be well and true, but the earnest way the issue is presented, by having a character literally say that she’s “breaking walls,” makes it all seem rather forced.
That earnestness, which mars the whole script, also manifests in Rickards’ lead performance. She gives Burke the requisite bright-eyed enthusiasm that makes her believable as a resolute athlete. However, she never varies the performance, even as Burke grows up and faces many emotional setbacks. Rickards maintains the same eagerness in her face whether Burke is fighting in the ring, determined to recover from Wolfe’s abuse, or facing the romantic dilemma of falling in love with her son-in-law.
Most of the rest of the cast coasts through well enough, but do not give any distinctive performances. On the other hand, Woll, as the tragic wrestler Gladys Killem, manages to chart a believable character arc from passionate innocence to resigned surrender.
In the many wrestling matches, Avildsen keeps cutting from the ring to the audience. There’s little girls looking up to Burke, spectators showing their passion for one wrestler or hostility to another. However, all the extras seem to have the same beaming look on their faces, as if they’ve been given the same note of how to stare down the lens, undercutting any tension from the fights.
Additionally, Andrew Strahorn’s overlit cinematography makes all the venues look the same, whether dingy or glamorous. Some scenes end oddly, with a lingering shot that leads to a slow fade out to black. That might be signifying that the audience needs to pay attention to what happened, or that what has transpired marks a turning point. Whatever it is, it’s a distracting gimmick.
Avildsen fares better with another technique: using the wrestling match announcer as narrator to inform the audience of what’s happening during and after a match. That seems natural to the story and pushes the narrative forward in an organic way. There’s a jarring note in the epilogue intertitles, which state that Wolfe, who has been presented thus far as an abuser, as a pioneer in female wrestling. It’s a muddled storytelling note, as if the filmmakers did not want to offend anyone. This is the same notion that makes this more of a hagiographic portrait than a truly thoughtful biographical film.
At a running time of more than two hours, “Queen of the Ring” becomes a self-serious, solemn slog. The filmmakers think Burke’s life is worth documenting, however this all-excellence, no-foibles look at her life does not render her a believable person. Despite being a sports melodrama, the filmmaking fails to distinguish either components, stylistically or narratively. “Queen of the Ring” is more of a montage of the highlights of Burke’s illustrious life, rather than an entertaining film.
