Vague Visages’ Swing Bout review contains minor spoilers. Maurice O’Carroll’s 2024 movie features Ciara Berkeley, Chrissie Cronin and Sinead O’Riordan. Check out the VV home page for more film criticism, movie reviews and film essays.

There’s a surprisingly long tradition of great female boxing in Ireland, with Olympic champion Katie Taylor immediately springing to mind. None of that national pride is present in Swing Bout, which focuses instead on the catty underbelly of the sport amid a cast of characters who vary from kind-of-dodgy to downright deplorable. Ciara Berkeley’s up-and-comer Toni is ostensibly the heroine, but even she’s got a checkered past and a chip on her shoulder. Those looking to see some in-ring action will likely come away from Swing Bout disappointed, since it gradually becomes clear that filmmaker Maurice O’Carroll will never actually get there. A bloody brawl does eventually ensue, but the writer-director takes a massive gamble by spending 90 minutes with female boxers, only to push them aside when their big moment finally arrives. 

Hilariously, Swing Bout shares certain DNA with Booksmart (2019), although the two movies couldn’t be more different otherwise. It kicks off with Toni quietly listening to a foul-mouthed motivational speaker (voiced by Love/Hate [2010] breakout star John Connors), much like Beanie Feldstein’s Booksmart character, Molly, who advises on waiting “for those motherfuckers to blink first.” Unlike Olivia Wilde’s coming-of-age film, Swing Bout keeps returning to this narration again and again, thus lessening the impact. More effective is how O’Carroll introduces the idea of a swing bout itself through a pre-match interview. But unfortunately, this is the last time that any exposition is delivered without bludgeoning the audience over the head with it. At one point, Toni’s coach yells, “welcome to the fight game,” which sounds like a placeholder line that O’Carroll forgot to rewrite along the way.

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Essentially, a swing bout fills a gap in the filming schedule, meaning fighters wait around all night to see whether they’ll even get a shot in the ring and often leave without competing. As Emma (Sinead O’Riordan, who also produced the film) informs her charge at one point, they’re lucky they’re not getting changed in the parking lot, never mind while surrounded by potential opponents in a cramped dressing room. Swing Bout was shot entirely at Páirc Uí Chaoimh Stadium in County Cork, with the action seemingly taking place in real time. Handheld cameras lend a sense of urgency to all the action that’s happening behind the scenes, the focus flitting between the various shady characters as bets are made, alliances are formed/destroyed and tempers run increasingly high. 

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In Swing Bout, Toni is super young, broke and hungry (in every sense of the word). She’s also a well-spoken Brit surrounded by Irish people, but this remains curiously unremarked upon — surely it should be the basis of her opponents many verbal jabs, at the very least? Berkeley is captivating in her feature debut, instantly believable as both a wide-eyed wannabe champion and someone who’s been beaten down by the tough hand she was dealt in life. Toni’s constant fretting over whether her mother has shown up to the fight as promised is heartbreaking, but it’s also easy to imagine her boxing the face off cocky newcomer Vicki (Chrissie Cronin), a TikTokker who’s unfairly given a leg up because of her social media followers — something anybody looking to get their footing in the entertainment industry can also empathize with.

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Toni is disgusted when Emma encourages her to throw a fight, not realizing that her trainer has already bet against her, or that there’s a whole mechanism set up to benefit the men higher up in the chain, who are already so wealthy that they snort cocaine like it’s going out of fashion and drop hundreds of thousands of Euro on home repairs (before roughing up the poor man who failed to complete the job). As the Casey brothers, Micko and Jack, Frank Prendergast and Ben Condron, respectively, play two sides of the same oily coin. Micko is softer spoken but clearly deadly, while the vituperative Jack is all show in his flashy suits and sharp shoes. Condron delivers Swing Bout’s standout performance aside from Berkeley and Kin (2021-23) star Baz Black as Flann, who briefly features in a subplot as a prize fighter who hasn’t stepped into the ring in nearly two years and mistakenly tries to appeal to Micko’s humanity. Condron devours the meaty role, electrifying every scene he’s in and waking up the other stiff, shaky performers around him in the process.

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There’s an inescapable staginess to Swing Bout, almost like it began as a one-act play. Much of the dialogue is clunky, lumbering the cast with going bigger to make it land. There’s also a staggering lack of attention to detail, most notably in the many references to Vicki being so heavily fake-tanned that she’s orange (she’s actually quite pale) and, even worse, Emma having fake boobs even though no effort has been made to create that effect, either through makeup or a push-up bra. Considering it’s a recurring joke at her expense, it’s a glaring oversight. These issues become more obvious the more convoluted the plot gets, as additional characters pop up and intertwined storylines get introduced. The single location is a good shout, but there’s little visual panache to Swing Bout beyond an evocative early shot of Toni set against a yellow background, which has been smartly used as part of the promotional material and is echoed later.

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Swing Bout filters the typical boxing clichés through an Irish lens, but the only punches thrown happen outside the ring, which is a big risk to take in a movie like this. Having said that, when the action finally does bubble over and become physical, O’Carroll’s film sparks to life in a major way, the ensuing violence making it almost worth trekking through over an hour of O’Carroll tepidly diverting back and forth between the various parties. Is this just a world full of predators? Who, if anybody, are viewers supposed to root for? Stacking a movie with unlikable characters is a bold move, and it’s certainly paid off in the past, but Swing Bout doesn’t establish enough of a backstory for any of the key players for them to register beyond the individual performances, which veer wildly from convincing (Berkeley, Condon, Black) to wooden (a couple of nosy cops, an uncredited mustachioed gentleman and his bratty daughter, all of whom feel like they’re in an entirely different film — one with a better sense of humor).

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O’Caroll doesn’t offer a specific take on the boxing industry or its inner machinations in Swing Bout, or at least not enough of one for the audience to cling onto and follow through to the end — which is unnecessarily abrupt given all the setup, leaving his female characters feeling shortchanged as a result. Maybe it was about the journey rather than the destination? 

Swing Bout released digitally on May 12, 2025 via London UK: Orion Productions.

Joey Keogh (@JoeyLDG) is a writer from Dublin, Ireland with an unhealthy appetite for horror movies and Judge Judy. In stark contrast with every other Irish person ever, she’s straight edge. Hello to Jason Isaacs. Thank you for reading film criticism, movie reviews and film reviews at Vague Visages.

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