Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Knuckledust’ on Hulu, A Fight Club Movie That Bites From Tarantino And Guy Ritchie

There are so many movies about underground fight clubs staged in cavernous underground spaces. Should we be more concerned about sinkholes? Has the building inspector given these facilities a pass? What would it take for a criminal enterprise to excavate ten stories into the earth, build out its multi-disciplinary octagon/brothel/dungeon/administrative office, and keep the citizenry unawares? These questions go unanswered in Knuckledust (Hulu).

KNUCKLEDUST: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Knuckledust is a multi-tiered subterranean club where morally fluid party people pay to watch fistfights to the death in a beveled cement atrium that resembles a Roman amphitheatre crossed with a dank, ill-lit parking garage. When we arrive on the scene, it’s from the point of view of Serena (Camille Rowe), whose evening gown and refined poise conceal her bankrupt soul. This is Serena’s fight club, and she micromanages every aspect of the operation, from negotiating with a moneyed simp named Requin (Rohan Gurbaxani) for more human punching bags to ordering around her chief henchman, the outrageously mulletted Jeremiah (Gethin Anthony). An early elevator sequence travels with Jeremiah from floor to floor in the complex, revealing the rogues’ gallery of security heavies, cocaine waitresses, sex workers, and bloodied maintenance technicians who staff up Serena’s dark carnival.

When we meet Hard Eight (Moe Dunford), Serena is leaning on him to take a dive in the third round. A financial boon for her, but from the size of the guy he’s tasked with fighting, a tall order for Hard Eight. But it doesn’t happen like that anyway, because Hard Eight manages to shoot his way out of Knuckledust, and the club is eventually raided by the cops (a group that includes Jaime Winstone, Dave Bibby, and Knuckledust writer-director James Kermack), who try to sort out who’s living, who’s guilty, and who’s just fodder for the fight club’s human trafficking mill. Knuckledust then shifts into extended interrogation room sequences between Hard Eight, who is revealed to be an ex-soldier named Roy Brody, and Chief Inspector Keaton (Kate Dickie) that shift the timeline into a series of flashbacks, one of which is animated. Is Hard Eight/Roy a murderer, a killer, or both? What is the Knuckledust club’s connection to a spate of homeless military vets mysteriously disappearing? And why is Inspector Keaton so keen to find out what happened to Serena?

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? The tradition of a tough guy AWOL soldier putting up his dukes in an underground fight club reaches all the way back to Jean-Claude Van Damme in 1990’s Lionheart. But Knuckledust gets so wrapped up in its bantering cops, bickering hitmen, and blathering underworld upper management that it’s really only using the fight club frame to present a tale more typical to the crime films of Guy Ritchie’s high water mark.

Performance Worth Watching: Kate Dickie of Game of Thrones and The Witch fame has prodigious acting chops, and she outclasses her Knuckledust co-stars here, consistently lending the thin material a gravity and depth it might not deserve.

Memorable Dialogue: With its myriad winking references to Pulp Fiction and reams of snarky chatter imported from the Guy Ritchie school, Knuckledust has to exist in acknowledgement of its own self-awareness, right? Well, maybe. The clearest moment that that’s actually happening comes during a third act gunfight. “Is this where you deliver a cool yet comical one liner?” a wounded henchman asks Our Hero, who just says “Nope” as he dispatches him w/ a kill shot.

Sex and Skin: Live snuff isn’t Club Knuckledust’s only attraction. One subterranean level includes an S&M/bondage lair, which here is played for broad, too obvious comedy.

Our Take: From its hitmen who squabble all the way to their mark’s front door before drawing their pistols in unison, to the use of the word “palooka” as a put-down, and even to its unlikely downshift into animation, Knuckledust owes the stylistic touches of Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill films a debt it doesn’t seem worried about paying. It’s never clear here what is homage and what is a grab, like another sequence that channels the visceral, claustrophobic fight scenes in Jong Boon-ho’s Snowpiercer, but tries awkwardly to play it for cheap laughs. Bouncing it’s more violent moments off empty gallows humor and stretches of drama where characters claim heady motivations for their otherwise callow actions leads to further disorientation, and murky lighting throughout doesn’t help with finding one’s bearings.

Knuckledust does have some fun with its incessant banter. “You have balls,” a rich client tells the evil boss Serena. “Balls break,” she says. “I don’t.” And the cast squeezes a few extra drops out of the material when it can, particularly Kate Dickie as the chief inspector, Moe Dunford as Hard Eight, and Chris Patrick-Simpson as a put upon henchman underling in Serena’s employ. But with its wild swings in mood and intention, Knuckledust can’t maintain enough momentum to keep things that interesting.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Knuckledust‘s neck-breaking tonal shifts and cheeky riffs on QT and Ritchie make it a mixed bag. You either feel like you’ve seen it all before, or forget why you’re watching it in the first place.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges

Watch Knuckledust on Hulu