Comedic icon Wanda Sykes tackles her first dramatic role with Tamika Miller’s underwhelming boxing drama, “Undercard.” While most films like these focus on the rise (and eventual fall) of their fighters, Miller’s film turns its attention to the coach and her journey to recapture her former success. Sykes steps into the role enthusiastically, but Miller’s script (with cowriter Anita M. Cal) is beat-you-over-the-head melodramatic, making Sykes’ committed effort to deliver heartfelt pathos all the more difficult to buy.
Cheryl “No Mercy” Stewart (Sykes) is a boxing trainer at Baba T’s Boxing Gym, named for and owned by her mentor and close friend, Baba T (“Abbott Elementary” regular William Stanford Davis). A former champion, Cheryl’s career was cut short by legal troubles and addiction. Now, her focus is on making the greats rather than being one herself. But even though she’s taken herself out of the spotlight, the weight of life’s troubles still threatens to take her down.
Miller’s film races through its beats to define said troubles. In the first fifteen minutes of the film, we are given separate vignettes regarding her boxing career, troubled past, AA meetings, estrangement from her son, flirtationship with her tattoo artist, and an eviction. Outside of this first quarter-hour (though not by long) is also a custody battle for her adopted niece, Meka (Estella Kahiha), who is inching closer to being a ward of the state due to Cheryl’s financial instability. These ploys for a sympathetic protagonist desperately whiz by before one can even set their feet.
Tying together the personal and professional, Cheryl sees an opportunity to reconcile with her son, Keith (Bentley Green), himself a promising boxer, via a trainer-coach relationship. Despite their estrangement, she’s watched all of his fights over the years and knows his strengths and weaknesses better than he does. She wants to coach him all the way to a championship belt, and with the touch-and-go commitment from his coach Hector (Berto Colon) souring his ambitions, the duo dips their toes into reconnection.
“Undercard” is a relationship drama disguised as a boxing film, but it doesn’t succeed in either realm. Watching a comedy giant take on a pensive role comes with its own nail-biting apprehension, and unfortunately, this anticipation provided most of the film’s tension. The boxing and training scenes themselves are lackluster, and moments of attempted pathos don’t hold water. Sykes’ ambition to excel in this role is almost too clear: it’s often apparent just how hard she’s trying to deliver. She’s out of her depth, and her performance feels shallow and forced. Parallel, the screenplay’s overwritten, half-baked quality wears down on both the actors and the audience.
The script is terribly plain, laying out every tidbit of expositional information and every intended emotion. Overwhelmed by the wealth of subplots (and the dedication to check in on each of them with machinic regularity), “Undercard” is a slapdash set of emotional requests that are increasingly hard to fulfill. Green’s performance buoys the film a bit, though his adjoining plot as a street hustler comes and goes at random.
“Undercard,” in addition to being basic, is also incredibly convenient. The menagerie of extraneous storylines rear their heads only once the present emotion has been exhausted. The reunion between Cheryl and Keith, despite being the center of the story, doesn’t make sense. For the amount of hurt, neglect, and damage done, their resurrection is far too speedy with too little resistance. But alas, without earning it, we are prompted to buy it quickly and fully so that the film can continue. This pattern of simplistic face-value acceptance is precisely what plagues the film, infecting it at its root and preventing the growth of a fruitful execution.
