THE BRONZE Review

All comedies try to make us laugh. That's kind of the point. Still, there is a difference between trying to make audiences laugh by saying the unexpected out loud and those unexpected things actually being funny. In The Bronze The Big Bang Theory's Melissa Rauch plays washed up gymnast Hope Annabelle Gregory who still managed to medal at the 2004 Rome Olympics after shattering her achilles during a routine. She became something of an American hero of those particular games, the athlete the media chose to heap large amounts of coverage on because of her narrative maybe more so than because of her actual talent. Hope says a lot of things that might not be considered polite or politically correct, but that doesn't make her funny. Sure, I understand that a fair amount of comedy can come from degrading someone, something, or even ourselves, but no matter how hard these demeaning jokes make us laugh ( or don't) one thing remains to be true and that is the fact they come from a place of fear; we're attempting to distract ourselves from our own vulnerability. In short, we're trying to make ourselves feel better about our own lives. Hope does this consistently throughout The Bronze and while the juxtaposition of what we expect from polite society and what Hope delivers can be genuinely funny here and there the majority of the time the character simply comes across as self-centered, crass, and just plain nasty. Maybe this is because Hope is the only character the film cares to flesh out and so, while we somewhat get to know her father (Gary Cole), her new apprentice (Haley Lu Richardson), her love interest (Thomas Middleditch) and her arch nemesis (Sebastian Stan), because each of them are more or less targets for Hope to hurl her insults at rather than fully formed people it is nearly impossible for us to understand why she seems to naturally hate everyone. The only thing she clearly has an affinity for is herself and keeping her name and image at the height of its power in her hometown of Amherst, Ohio, but as these things go all of that is about to change.