Anna's (Malin Ackerman) life is in a funk. Her car was repossessed, her coffee shop was losing money before it burned down, she's on 'self-imposed abstinence', and still processing her mother's death, and not nearly as far along as her dad (Kevin Nash), who's got himself a boyfriend and a spray tan.
So her friend Charleen (Dulce Sloan) brings her to a fight club, where Anna quickly finds herself on the wrong side of Olivia (Bella Thorne), a very aggressive woman determined to make the place fit her notion of it. Which is less a supportive environment where people can release some aggression, and more an "only the strong survive!" combat sports place. Anna has to get some training, and ends up with a drunk guy (Alec Baldwin) who supposedly trained Sugar Ray.
It's a little oddly paced, or maybe oddly put together. There's a reveal about the origin of the club that feels like the sort of surprise usually saved for late in the movie. The sort of thing that you'd expect to motivate her to win her big showdown with Olivia. It's instead brought out after Anna's first fight, to motivate her to come back, and possibly drive her to run her mouth at Olivia and set up their big fight. Anna quits, or vows to quit, the whole thing no less than 3 times in a 100 minute movie, being alternately talked out of it by Charleen, Olivia (in a mean girl way) and Alec Baldwin's character.
There's also a sort of awkward romance between her and the brother of one of the women who runs the club, the brother acting as sort of a ring doctor. Since Anna gets one-shot KO'ed a lot early on, they see a fair bit of each other. Or he sees a fair bit of her, since she's spending part of that time unconscious. It's complicated by the fact he goes on a date with Thorne's character at one point, so there's avoidance and denial of feelings and all that jazz.
The movie does avoid the development that as Anna starts to have success in the ring, this automatically translates to success in the rest of her life. Even as she wins fights - though her face is remarkably unbruised during the daytime, she must be great disguising it - she's still avoiding the doctor, still can't get a new job, and is evicted from her apartment. Things don't start to turn around on that score until she tries something new in the rest of her life. Even if the fighting thing is new, she's still in the same patterns for everything else. Avoidance and taking the safe path. She ultimately finds success when she says to heck with it and tries something different from what she's been doing.
Ackerman plays Anna as awkward and uncertain most of the time. Never at a loss for the worst way to put things. That doesn't exactly fade as she gets more comfortable in the ring, so at least it's a consistent part of her personality. She only has so much in the tank for clever conversation. Sloan's the outspoken beset friend, always trying to draw a laugh from Anna or push her to get outside her comfort zone. Which means she gets a lot of the best lines, whether it's in reference to her sexual prowess or how badly she's going to beat someone up, and Sloan sells those pretty well. It doesn't feel like Charleen's acting, so much as she's fully this confident. Conversely, Baldwin's coasting on acerbic drunk. This is not a role requiring any great effort from him.
Thorne's mostly just aggressive and in everyone's face, but does get to show a more clever side in the scene where Anna unwittingly applies for a job at a coffee place Olivia owns. Anna tries to backpedal off some of her (weak) shit talking, Olivia plays friendly, discussing the paintings on the wall and her gym in the coffee place, and then cuts Anna's knees out from under her in a couple of sentences.
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