For a nation obsessed with professional sport, there is a surprising dearth of Aussie sports films. There have been, of course, a handful of memorable ones: The Club (1980), The Coolangatta Gold (1984) and, more recently, The Final Winter (2007).

But apart from the low-budget 2024 film Life After Fighting – understandable if you haven’t heard of it, it made less than A$6,000 at the box office – Beast is the first Australian film to be set in the world of mixed martial arts.

Patton James (Daniel MacPherson) is a retired fighter pulled back into the game due to tough circumstances. His young daughter Maddie (Sol Nc Carrico) needs to see an expensive specialist, his wife Luciana (Kelly Gale) is pregnant with another, and he barely makes a living working for a petty tyrant on a fishing boat.

When the opportunity to earn $150,000 fighting his former nemesis, world champion Xavier Grau (Bren Foster), arises, he finds it impossible to resist, despite the imprecations of his loving wife.

So Patton returns to his old trainer Sammy (Russell Crowe). And despite some bad blood between them, Sammy and his daughter Rose (Amy Shark, in her feature film debut) end up helping him get in shape for the fight.

After several trials and tribulations, the whole thing culminates in a bout in Thailand. “A fight all about redemption, no… revenge”, the commentator tells us. Guess the result?

Bland delivery, bad accents

Beast has all the expected cliches, and to say the narrative is predictable is an understatement.

But for a feel good “against the odds” sports film, this isn’t necessarily a problem. There can be something pleasurable in watching cliché after cliché unfold, and genre cinema’s capacity to fulfil our expectations is one of the reasons we keep coming back to it.

But the problem is, Beast for the most part rings as hollow as the character’s names, which could only exist in a scriptwriter’s dreams – Patton James and Xavier Grau… come on.

Director Tyler Atkins found something charming and fresh in his undeniably sentimental earlier film, Bosch & Rockit (2022). Beast, however, feels stale. Much of this is technical, with many of the elements not really working (or not working well together).

Russell Crowe is a fine actor, and his revival as an angry, hefty middle-aged chap (as in the smashing 2020 film Unhinged) has been effective. But one can’t imagine this role would have stretched him much, and it feels like he’s just going through the motions.

Similarly, we’re consistently aware of the effort TV star MacPherson is putting into the lead role of Patton, and this makes for a valiant but not entirely convincing performance.

Kelly Gale acts like a model as Patton’s long-suffering wife, her undeniable presence offset by a strikingly monotone delivery.

The only standouts are screen veterans Matt Nable, excellent as usual in a tiny role as loan shark Barry Dunne, and Nathan Phillips, who has a small but memorable role as the skipper of the fishing boat, and Bren Foster, a martial artist-turned actor who commands every scene in which he appears.

The whole thing plays like Australian television rather than cinema. It’s like a 1940s melodrama with none of the style or mood – blandly lit with rudimentary cinematography, accompanied by a stock standard orchestral score, matching unconvincing American accents from some of the key actors (Luke Hemsworth’s accent as sleazy promoter Gabriel Stone perhaps explains why his career hasn’t been that of his brothers Chris or Liam).

At once unconvicing and strangely comforting

The screenplay is dull, co-written by Crowe, who also produced the film. It seems so concerned with coming across as an “Aussie film full of heart”, it ends up without any.

There are some unintentionally funny lines, such as what wise trainer Sammy says to Patton when he hears he’s taken the fight just for the money:

Time’s not a commodity like that. You’ve got moments and memories. If you don’t take the moments, you don’t get the memories.

That said, despite being soapy and not very convincing, Beast is quite watchable as a kind of sports telemovie – earnest, if a bit lame. Sure, it runs through the motions, but the motions are compelling enough to warrant a watch for fans of Aussie cheese.

There’s something eternally pleasurable about watching an against the odds sporting movie replete with training montages, even if it is Home and Away’s answer to Rocky IV.

Beast is showing on Stan from today.

Ari Mattes does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.