Fight to the Max

Documentarian Simeon Soffer garnered an Oscar nomination last year for his short film The Wildest Show in the South: The Angola Prison Rodeo, an entertaining and engrossing look at the prisoners in Louisiana who get to risk life and limb against horses and angry bulls once a year. He goes back to the same well for Fight to the Max, which deals with yet another pastime available to prisoners in Louisiana: boxing. It's fertile ground, certainly, full of trash-talking characters and inspirational stories, from the older veterans who become father figures and coaches to the younger first-timers turning their life around. Soffer's only weakness is that he still structures this piece like a short film, without giving us any kind of dramatic arc or narrowing the focus to one or two distinctive characters we can latch on to (it's narrated by ex-inmate and boxing champion Clifford Etienne, but as he's no longer a part of the prison action, his vignettes feel disconnected). The fact that last year also produced the outstanding, Oscar-nominated boxing documentary On the Ropes also doesn't help Soffer: That film set the bar extremely high. Nonetheless, he's a competent and still-developing filmmaking talent with a gift for infusing his subjects with humanity without hammering home a moral, though there are plenty to be found: in the prison guard who tells us that "corrections is a booming industry, it's a good career to get into these days," or in the contrast between the toned and disciplined fighters versus the comically out-of-shape prison guards (who, incidentally, get a big kick out of playing "promoter" in inter-prison match-ups). The film also makes a good case for bringing boxing back to its roots. Stripped of Don King, corrupt judges, and showbiz glitz, the sport has a purity and discipline that these convicted criminals occasionally manage to recapture.