“Queen of the Ring” is a film adaptation of Jeff Leen’s 2009 biography, “The Queen of the Ring: Sex, Muscles, Diamonds and the Making of an American Legend,” about Mildred Burke, a woman wrestler who started in the 1930s when it was illegal for two women to wrestle each other. Spanning from the 1930s to 1954, it is just as much a biopic about Mildred Burke, whom Emily Bett Rickards plays, as a movie about the creation of professional wrestling and the legalization of women wrestling. Burke initially seems like an unlikely candidate to become the three-time world champion of the NWA World Women’s Championship. She is a single mother waitress in a diner that her mother, Bertha (Cara Buono), owns. When she goes to her first wrestling match and watches Billy Wolfe (Josh Lucas), the heel, aka bad guy in wrestling, win, she discovers why she was born, but will she be able to overcome all the obstacles to make her dreams come true?
I travelled over twenty-five miles to see “Queen of the Ring” for one reason: women fighting! I went into it completely blind and got unexpectedly catapulted into a period piece with real actors, not an obscure project helmed with unknowns. Rickards played Felicity Smoak, tech genius on “Arrow,” and is almost unrecognizable as a buff brunette who defied the conventions of her time. Rickards is outstanding as a showboat whose mouth could write checks while her brawn could cash them. In “Arrow,” Felicity usually let others do the fighting, but Rickards shows her range as a woman who enjoyed kicking ass and defying gender norms. The image of a woman enjoying her body and fighting is still a revolutionary concept.
The first act depicts Mildred as the enthusiastic ingenue who eventually falls for the city slicker, Billy, and that character understandably occupies a lot of screentime since he is responsible for training women wrestlers, but it almost comes at the price of the rest of the story. When not wrestling, Mildred is reduced to looking cute and flexing her muscles. To be fair, from the opening act, the pacing is a bit rushed as if director and cowriter Ash Avildsen and cowriter Alston Ramsay want to stuff as many details as possible about a story that feels anachronistic but is not. It is an admirable ambition but comes at the price of short shifting a more cohesive, textured film. “Queen of the Ring” paints a different picture than people who wax nostalgic for a past that did not exist imagine. The women are brash, and there is not one trad wife among them. The lady wrestlers consist of Black women, lesbians and real villains who enjoy hurting people, which is different than people who dehumanize women and believe they are just innately better, not flawed human beings. The frenetic pace means that once information is flashed on screen, there is not enough time to read and process it, so it takes longer to catch up with the next scene, and sometimes the order of scenes feels as if it got edited in haste, especially the early scenes between Mildred and Gorgeous George (Adam Demos), a flamboyant wrestler.
Lucas injects more humanity into a man than he may have deserved. Based on how events unfold in “Queen of the Ring,” Billy is an abusive, controlling, sexual harasser, philandering, negligent homicidal, financially fraudulent horror show. Whenever Billy sins on screen, Lucas flashes through an array of emotions to reflect that the character realizes a step too late that he is doing wrong, becomes filled with regret and sorrow. It seems credible when he repents, but as events unfold, his actions do not reflect Lucas’ textured performance.
The matches are so fun, but it was annoying that the first members, Mae Young (Francesca Eastwood) and Elvira Snodgrass (Marie Avgeropoulos), who join Wolfe’s pack are not shown wrestling until the last act. If you watched “The 100,” you know what Avgeropoulos did as Blodreina and had some of the best fights scenes ever shown on television. “You are Wonkru, or you are the enemy of Wonkru. Choose.” Complete waste of an actor! Deborah Ann Woll from “True Blood” and the “Daredevil” franchise does her best with what she is given but also does not get much screentime. Real life wrestler Kailey Farmer, who plays Mildred’s nemesis, is awe-inspiring, and someone cast her in more movies because Dave Bautista may have some competition in the future.
What does “Queen of the Ring” show instead? The chaste romance between Mildred and the subservient, cowed Bill’s son, G. Bill (Tyler Posey, who looks like a young Chris Meloni, but do not get too excited), and it is the least credible portion of the film. While it serves an important plot point, the writers should have been less concerned that Mildred would seem like a heel once their relationship was revealed if not given more context, but any way that you cut it even with the gauziest of lights, it is still not a great look for one woman to date all the men in one family. Imagine if Billy dated Mildred and her mom. No. Do what you want among consenting adults, but they were so preoccupied with whether or not they couid, they didn’t stop to think they should.
The relationship between Mildred and her son, Joe Jr. (Gavin Casalegno), is supposed to be the fuel that helps her power through to the end of “Queen of the Ring,” but they barely appear related. A consistent flaw of the film is that the characters age in an uneven fashion. Mildred is supposed to be from Kansas but her son looks like he took a wrong turn at one of Ridley Scott’s more recent films set in Italy. Joe is missing for huge swaths of the film so when he reappears at the eleventh hour, it just does not work even though he is one of her main motivations.
Either Jack Pfefer, a professional wrestling promoter, needs his own biopic and/or Walter Goggins has main character energy., but all his scenes feel as if he deserves his own movie. There is a triptych scene with Jack, Gorgeous George and Black Panther (actor unknown), not the MCU icon, practicing their smack talk. In “Queen of the Ring,” smack talk is essential to the story crafted in the ring, and while Mildred is presented as a natural, it was a solid choice to reveal the art of it but detracted the focus from Mildred’s life.
If “Queen of the Ring” had done a better job with pacing and found a way to share the spotlight with the vast ensemble cast without feeling random and scattered, it could have become the next “A League of Their Own” (1992). Despite its flaws, it succeeds at giving an opportunity for Rickards to prove that she can handle the big screen and get out of her comfort zone. Even though the film takes some liberties with history, it is mostly true and delivers an important message about destroying preconceived notions of how a woman should exist in the world. While the actors are daintier than their real life counterparts, until Portia Woodman and Ilona Maher start acting, they will have to do.
