A documentary takes a look at Bisping’s tough and tender sides.
This slick documentary about the mixed martial arts fighter Michael Bisping spends a lot of its first half putting up a kind of cinematic “Tough Guys Only” sign. Bisping’s a crudely voluble bruiser from the North of England! His father was a sniper in the British Army! “Fighting is something that I liked, to be honest,” Bisping says, when not swearing at his critics.
OK, then. The movie is executive produced by Bisping himself, which signals a certain subjectivity. The director, Michael Hamilton, assembles a “Raging Bull”-style montage in the middle of the movie, alternating cage footage with home movies to underscore Bisping’s more tender side. This is all pretty conventional. But then the fighter’s story takes a twist.
In 2013, after getting a detached retina in a fight, Bisping became blind in one eye. Despite the vision loss — which he did not reveal, as it would have kept him out of the sport — he went on to become U.F.C. champion in 2016. For reasons that become obvious, Bisping and the movie do not detail how he got cleared to fight, but fight he did. And even the milquetoasts who have hung in there until this point will feel compelled to hand it to him.
The movie star Vin Diesel, with whom Bisping appeared in an action-packed movie, here waxes poetic about being an alpha male. And Joe Rogan shows up without the benefit of a trigger warning, but hey, Rogan was a U.F.C. commenter back in the day. He contributes the movie’s most amusing anecdote, in which Bisping, at a weigh-in, baits Vitor Belfort, a fighter who is known for being a devoted Christian, with the taunt “Jesus isn’t real.” As it happens, Belfort’s the guy who went on to deliver the blows that detached Bisping’s retina.
Bisping: The Michael Bisping Story
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
