They Fight (2026)

When I first clicked ‘play’ to watch ‘They Fight’ and began seeing André Holland in a do-rag and prison scrubs begging for his freedom, my first reaction was to click ‘stop’ and find something else to watch. I did not want to watch another Black man in a stereotypical role. The next day I came back and continued to watch it with an underlying sense of dismay.

Here’s the set-up: An ex-con/ex-boxing coach with an ex-lover wanders into the Congress Park Recreational Center and finds redemption.

I really wanted to like this film but it was hard to see past all the tropes that appear from the very beginning. André Holland(Walter) and Wendell Pierce(Slim) were as brilliant as always. Unfortunately, their impeccable performances were in the context of appealing to the “White gaze” - a term coined by Toni Morrison describing how Black art is altered to fit the perceptions of non-melanated folks.

It’s important to note the source material for this project is a documentary of the same title and a Washington Post article that chronicles the story of a self-taught boxing coach who uses the sweet science to connect with his stepson and eventually impacts the young men of Southeast DC. Some of those key elements that made this story so compelling were eliminated from the HULU original film.

It feels like Andrew Renzi, who directed the documentary, tried to squeeze as much out of this story as possible. He and ANDSCAPE had an agenda based on self-interest. They wanted to make it a more commercial project and they did so by relying on offensive, recycled stereotypes and not the kind of plot points that make a movie like this successful.

As a comparison, I am reminded of ‘The Karate Kid’. The one-on-one scenes between ‘Mr. Miyagi’ and ‘Daniel Laruso’ are what made it successful. There was very little of that in ‘They Fight’. Most of ‘Walter’s’ interactions with the boys centered around boxing, which is ironic since the title of the Washington Post article that spurred all of this is ‘It Ain’t All About Boxing’. There was a lot of chanting and such but not those wisdom nuggets that audiences respond to. Most of the mentoring was between ‘Slim’ and ‘Walter’. Which is where the White gaze comes in.

Most of the first act(and then some) focuses on ‘Walter’ transitioning out of incarceration. Although this is part of ‘Walter’s’ journey, we’ve already seen this in the previous incarnations of his story. They should have given us something different than the predictable “Black man released from prison and finds redemption” story.