If I have any consistent weakness when it comes to my entertainment, and mean this in any form, it’s tough women. I’ve read comics with tough women and books with tough women and watched movies with tough women and written books with tough women. I’ve even roleplayed my share of tough women back when I was into that sort of thing. Give me a tough woman and I am already halfway toward being wholly satisfied with whatever you put in front of me. Consequently this film, entitled Fight Night, garnered a lot of goodwill from me right from the get-go.

And a good thing, too, because Fight Night is a boxing movie, and if there’s any genre that hews closely to its tropes in nearly every outing, it’s the boxing story. There’s a lot in Fight Night that you’ve seen before, so if you’re looking for something totally original, I can tell you right now that you are not going to get it from this movie. Consequently you can make your decision about whether to continue reading this review immediately.

Fight Night begins with the travails of professional grifter Michael Dublin, played by Chad Ortis. Despite his ever-present suit, Dublin is not a classy guy, though he can pretend to be. His line is making a buck any way he can, if there’s a quick and dirty route to that buck, so much the better. In his very first scene he attempts to convince a bare-knuckle fighter to throw a match so they can both make some cash, but things go quickly awry. He follows this up not long later by selling a faulty rocket-fuel booster to a guy in a street race, only to see the guy’s car explode on startup. He’s in the middle of catching a beating for that escapade when he’s rescued by an itinerant fighter named Katherine Parker (Rebecca Neuenswander), who turns out to be a match for any man, even if he’s twice her size.

It seems that Neuenswander’s character wants into the underground boxing circuit that Dublin has access to, and he grabs hold of the opportunity to “manage” her on her fight to the top. This will require long road trips, some brutal hand-to-hand fighting and more than a little baring of souls along the way.

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Longtime readers of this blog may remember my review of the film, Albino Farm. The film featured wrestler Chris Jericho in a tiny part, and I warned everyone at the outset of that review to learn from my experience and never watch a horror movie simply because one of your favorite wrestlers happens to be in it. Let me now extend that warning to action films. Not all, perhaps, but at least some. You must tread carefully.

Bounty Hunters is a Canadian production originally titled Bail Enforcers (terrible name), and it serves as a vehicle for former WWE Women’s Champion, Trish Stratus. It’s a very slight film that runs just a spare 80 minutes including credits, and while I didn’t consider my time entirely wasted, I did find that I’ve gotten more enjoyment out of an episode of something like Nikita than I did from this.

Let me start by saying that I don’t know if bail enforcement is carried out the same way in Canada as it is in the United States, but I suspect not. Especially when said bail-enforcement agents carry weapons like these do. If I had to guess, I’d say that Bounty Hunters is meant to take place somewhere in the USA, despite the presence of profoundly Canadian-accented Boomer Phillips as comic relief, and the very visible Ontario license plates scattered around the production. Whatever the case, if you’re prepared to go along with the silly, TV-level escapades of Trish Stratus and company, all this Canadian-ness doesn’t matter at all.

The film starts in flash-forward because it is unfortunately heavily influenced by the now-dated Quentin Tarantino style. A standoff between the bounty hunters and a couple of criminals in a warehouse could lead to the death of Stratus’ character, Jules, who opens the picture with a little voiceover narration that thankfully doesn’t reappear for the rest of the running time.

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