Fighting with my Family (5 Stars)

There's a sentence I've used a few times in my blog, and I'm not ashamed to keep repeating it: "I knew this film would be good, but it's better than I expected". That's definitely true of "Fighting with my Family".

The story tells the true story of the British wrestler Paige, real name Saraya Bevis. It deals with how she became one of the biggest female wrestlers in the company World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). I wanted to see the film because I used to be a big fan of the WWE, or rather the WWF (World Wrestling Federation), as it was called until 2002. I first saw the WWF on television while I was on holiday in Scotland in 1990, but I didn't become a regular viewer until 1997. For me the WWF's greatest years were 1997 to 2002, referred to as the Attitude Era. In those days it was all about flamboyant wrestling, with most wrestlers being anti-heroes. After 2002 it was all about faces and heels, i.e. good guys and bad guys, which I found boring. The audience was programmed by scripted speeches to like one wrestler and hate another. I found this trite, and I stopped watching the WWE a few years later.

During my years as a WWF/WWE fan I watched all the Pay Per View events. I taped them and built up a large collection, which I eventually threw in the trash after unsuccessfully trying to give them away. I'm sure my tape of Over The Edge 1999 would have been valuable to wrestling fans, because it's the only PPV event which has never been released on VCR or DVD. PPV events were broadcast live on Sunday and repeated on Monday, but Over The Edge 1999 wasn't repeated because of Owen Hart's death during the broadcast. His accident happened off camera, but there was a long break while the commentator Jim Ross talked to the audience at home about what had happened. My tape is gone now. Tough luck.

The film itself is about the struggles of a young woman who was an underdog and outsider. She was fortunate enough to be born into a wrestling family. Her father Rick was the founder of the World Association of Wrestling (WAW). Despite its glamorous name, it was a small independent company in Norwich with very few employees apart from his family. Rick's children Zak and Saraya dreamt of joining the WWE, the world's biggest wrestling company. Zak was refused, whereas Saraya was accepted and became Paige. The rest of the film deals with Zak's reaction to being rejected and Paige's difficulties fitting in with the WWE wrestling community.

Most of the actors in the film aren't wrestlers, with the exception of Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Nick Frost is absolutely brilliant as Rick Knight. He looks and talks like a wrestler. The WWE trainer Hutch Morgan is played by Vince Vaughan, who has the size and muscular build to be a wrestler. It's excellent acting throughout. I've always liked true stories, and this has immediately become a film I want to add to my Blu-ray collection.

P.S. I wrote this review on March 21st, but I've backdated the post to the day I watched it in the cinema.