Against the Ropes

“She gave the boxing world the one-two punch they never saw coming.”

Jackie Kallen (Meg Ryan) works the edges of a boxing gym in Cleveland, a woman in a sport where the men in charge never let her forget it. She takes a chance on Luther Shaw (Omar Epps), a young fighter with talent and no one in his corner. Charles S. Dutton, who also plays the trainer Felix Reynolds, directs it as a straight-ahead underdog story, all hard bargaining and bell-ringing, with no fuss about where it's headed.