Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #173 Chokeslam (2017)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

This much appreciator benefactor occasionally throws me random movies to write about as well, like 2017’s Chokeslam, which fortuitously happens to fit the theme of Wrestling Month. 

Chokeslam is unique for a wrestling movie in several ways. First of all, Chokeslam is Canadian, which means that all of the grapplers apologize profusely to their opponents when they successfully execute a move and to their managers they don’t. 

Despite its throat-punch of a title, Chokeslam is not a violent action drama but rather a romantic comedy, the rare wrestling movie that is funny on purpose. 

Until it takes a serious wrong turn into melodrama in its third act Chokeslam is funny in a surprisingly quirky, deadpan, understated Canadian way rooted in characters and a richly observed cultural milieu rather than broad physical shtick. Then Chokeslam unwisely decides to not be funny for an extended stretch, a mistake it never quite recovers from. 

Not polite to point!

But for a good hour or so Chokeslam is a bona fide charmer anchored by a winning lead performance by Chris Marquette as Corey Swanson, a 28 year old underachiever who never got over his high school girlfriend Sheena DeWilde (Amanda Crew) rejecting his marriage proposal in front of the whole school. Crew is best known for playing one of the two most central female roles on Silicon Valley, which means that she was roughly the 47th most important character overall. 

I’ve known plenty of people like Swanson in my life. They invariably got the fuck out of whatever shitty small town they grew up in by going to college, doing a fuck ton of drugs, having lots of sex and doing everything they could to forget the long, dispiriting years they spent suffering silently because they weren’t athletic or popular or rich. 

Not Swanson. Instead of using his intelligence and wry humor to escape the small town Canadian hell where he went to high school and go to a funky college town where people can appreciate him he instead chose to marinate in the banal misery of small time life. 

Our diminutive hero has allowed his high profile high school rejection, and the humiliations that followed, most notably a rumor that he was so distraught by the rejected marriage proposal that he attempted suicide, to define him, and define him harshly as a loser going nowhere in a shit town. 

Corey works at a deli, still lives with his over-protective, domineering mother and is so broke and desperate that he receives therapy from a woman who sees him at the home improvement store where she works when not sneaking out to smoke weed. 

Corey’s luck starts to change when he’s unsuccessfully robbed at gunpoint by his old classmate Luke Petrie (Michael Eklund). In high school, Luke was a big deal but as an adult he’s an aggressively unsuccessful space cadet whose mental state perpetually alternates between “foggy” and “out of his goddamn mind.” 

They have fun!

Corey and Luke go to their tenth high school reunion together, where Corey ends up getting accidentally injured by the love of his life while she’s in the process of beating up several other classmates. 

While Corey has gone nowhere with his life, Sheena has been globe-trotting as controversial, hot-headed professional wrestler Smasheena. But all those years of travel, wear and tear on her body and being cynically exploited by unscrupulous promoters and reality show producers have taken a toll. 

The physically and spiritually exhausted athlete wants to leave the business. Her manager/boyfriend Tab Hennessey (Niall Matter) is initially supportive of her decision, as long as he can make money and headlines off a final match. But as his name and profession betray, Tab Hennessey is a fucking tool who only cares about Tab Hennessey. 

In his zeal to get close to the one that got away, Corey throws himself into convincing his ex-girlfriend to have her retirement bout in her home town, and to make it as memorable and successful as possible. 

Romantic comedies where tall, conventionally attractive women like Crew are successfully wooed by short, unsuccessful men who are attractive in neither a conventional or unconventional fashion often come off as wish fulfillment-powered male power fantasies coated in a thin to thick layer of misogyny. 

That is thankfully and surprisingly not the case here. It’s easy to see why a woman as successful and desirable as Sheena would be interested in a man like Corey. He’s funny and smart and likable and gazes at her with rapt admiration. Corey makes Sheena feel good about herself but more importantly he makes her feel seen and appreciated as someone with much more to offer the world than the ability to convincingly pretend to beat people up.

In the small town where Corey and Sheena were high school sweethearts, he’s a breath of fresh air, someone decidedly different. It’s even easier to see why Corey would be hopelessly hung up on Sheena.

Instead of casting a wrestler and hoping they could act Chokeslam instead cast an actress that could be taught to wrestle. Crew delivers a refreshingly nuanced performance that captures her character’s world-weariness as well as the brawling charisma that made her a star in a bruisingly competitive field. 

Marquette and Crew give their romantic leads depth and pathos. They’re real people in an unreal realm with wonderfully unforced chemistry. 

Unfortunately, as it lurches to a close, Chokeslam injects conflict and melodrama where they are not needed or appropriate. Corey’s high school humiliations begin to feel like a clunky origin story for a super hero or super villain that clumsily establishes how EVERYTHING in a character’s life can be traced back to a formative trauma. 

In developments begging to be left on the editing room floor we discover that the reason Luke feels indebted to Corey, beyond, you know, his old classmate not turning him into the police when he tried to rob him is because he anonymously tormented Corey following the public rejection of his marriage proposal a decade earlier, something that might have played a role in Corey spending time in a mental hospital. 

As a kooky comic sidekick, Luke is a fun character. As a dramatic character wrestling (no pun intended) with the sins of the past, on the other hand, he’s a non-starter. Tab Hennessey is similarly inspired as a sly parody of the ultimate show-business phony before he makes a heel turn in the third act that turns him into a generic bad guy.

Chokeslam has two smartly cast and appealing leads and a terrific supporting cast that includes real-life WWE superstar Mick Foley as a scruffy, ancient veteran of the grappling game who embodies the soul and spirit of wrestling in its purest form. He’s not just a wrestling legend: he’s wrestling personified, and oozes grit and conviction and authenticity.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that a movie about professional wrestling would eventually begin to feel phony and forced. Chokeslam’s finishing move is a total bust but even if the Canadian comedy drags at the end it’s still a cut above the typical wrestling movie. 

Chokeslam is a different kind of wrestling movie. So even though it is not entirely successful overall I quite liked it, in no small part because at its best it transcends sports, movies and sports movie cliches before it ultimately succumbs to some of the hokiest tropes in wrestling and movies. 

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