This film is a genuinely moving story about courage, identity and inner freedom, centered on an intersex person trying to figure out who they really are. The fact that an actual intersex actor was cast in the lead role is genuinely worth applauding. It is apparently a remake of a classic film of same name that came out in 1972. Since I have not seen the film, I really have references to compare, which is good. Set in Spain, we meet Adela, a woman in her twenties and the only child of a conservative couple living in a small provincial town. Her days are mostly spent at the family antique shop, and her whole life has been shaped by her mother's overprotectiveness and total silence around her intersex condition, something she's faced real social discrimination for. Despite all the restrictions placed on her, she finds odd little pockets of normalcy in her life, and her closest connection is a gay priest, basically the only person she feels she can talk to freely. That quiet routi...
Shane and Roman are boxing rivals. Without Roman knowing, his dad's female enforcer threatens Shane and tells him to throw the match or his coach gets killed, but Shane refuses to play along and beats Roman anyway. When Roman finds out what she tried to pull, he fires her on the spot, apologizes to Shane, and pays off his debt for him. Shane though assumes Roman was in on the whole thing from the start and won't accept any of it. So Roman comes up with a plan and hires Shane as his personal assistant and coach to help him train. It's pretty clear early on that Roman has feelings for Shane, and the more time Shane spends around him the more he starts catching feelings too. Just as things start heating up, Roman's mafia father shows up and starts trying to push Shane out of his son's life, using threats and money both, but by this point Roman is too far gone for Shane to let any of that work, and he's ready to fight for it. The fired enforcer resurfaces, exactly like you'd expect, and kidnaps Shane's coach. Shane agrees to save him on the condition that he walks away from Roman forever. It all comes to a head in a final showdown that puts both Shane and Roman's lives at risk, and Shane ends up being the one who saves Roman. That's enough to finally change the father's mind and he admits Shane has been in this for love and not money all along.
This one is clearly taking heavy inspiration from Heated Rivalry, and not just in the name either, they basically swapped hockey for boxing and kept one of the leads Russian, accent and all, hoping that combination would just work on its own. Roman being this hot Russian character is obviously a deliberate callback and somehow it still kind of lands. The two leads have decent chemistry together too. The problem is by now you can predict exactly what's coming and when. There's always going to be a villainous woman who's either the ex, the supposed fiancée, or some mafia lackey. She'll go rogue at some point and try to tear the couple apart. The disapproving family is another trope that shows up to create distance before everything eventually resolves. It feels like the formula is just throw in some drama, a villain, family disapproval, a few kisses, some sex, two attractive guys, and call it a show. I genuinely don't know if these vertical dramas are making any real money but they're solid enough as pure escapism while they last. I don't expect to remember a single detail of this one a few months from now. For what it's worth, this gave me a decent hour of distraction while I was at the gym, good eye candy, perfectly watchable. (5/10)
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