Welcome to the Cage of Disappointment
Every now and then, a film comes along with a premise so brutally simple you can’t help but think, Okay, this might actually work. Raze is one of those movies. Women forced to fight to the death for the amusement of rich sociopaths? Sure. Zoë Bell, the stuntwoman-turned-badass from Death Proof leading the charge? Even better. A director promising to treat the concept “seriously” without the sleaze of exploitation cinema? Sounds respectable.
Then the movie starts, and you realize you’ve been conned into watching Fight Club as imagined by a philosophy major who just discovered CrossFit and trauma bonding.
Raze wants to be gritty, feminist, and profound. Instead, it’s a grimy endurance test that mistakes misery for meaning. It’s Hunger Games without the budget, Kill Bill without the charm, and Gladiator if everyone involved had taken a vow of emotional abstinence.
Plot: Women Punching Each Other for the Greater Good (of No One)
Zoë Bell plays Sabrina, one of fifty women kidnapped by a husband-and-wife duo of upper-class maniacs, Elizabeth (Sherilyn Fenn) and Joseph (Doug Jones, apparently on loan from an H.P. Lovecraft fever dream). These two, in the grand tradition of people with too much money and not enough Netflix, have decided to build a secret underground facility where women are forced to fight to the death for their entertainment.
If they refuse to fight, or lose, a sniper kills their loved ones. Because apparently billionaires in the Raze universe are too lazy to play golf.
The women are all dressed identically — barefoot, in white tank tops and gray sweatpants — a look that says “post-apocalyptic CrossFit class.” They’re told nothing, given no weapons, and shoved into concrete pits where they’re forced to beat each other senseless while unseen spectators get their sadistic kicks.
That’s it. That’s the movie.
Now, a smart filmmaker could make something interesting out of this — a psychological study on survival, gender, or the spectacle of violence. Instead, Raze just repeats itself like a broken record: scream, punch, choke, cry, die, repeat. By the 10th fight, you start rooting for the walls to collapse and put everyone (including the audience) out of their misery.
Zoë Bell Deserves Better (and So Do We)
Zoë Bell is a phenomenal physical performer — a stuntwoman with real screen presence and the kind of quiet intensity that makes her believable as a survivor. Unfortunately, Raze treats her like a punching bag with a backstory.
Her character Sabrina gets a few flashbacks, most of which are designed to remind you that she’s a good person trapped in a bad situation. But the film is so obsessed with its grim tone that it forgets to give her a personality beyond “determined woman who can punch through drywall.”
Rachel Nichols, Tracie Thoms, and a handful of other capable actresses fill out the roster of doomed combatants, but their characters are sketched so thinly they might as well be named “Fighter #12” and “Future Corpse #7.” When they die, the movie pauses for a moment of emotional gravitas, as if expecting you to care. You don’t. You can’t. There’s nothing to care about.
Even Rosario Dawson shows up for a brief cameo — a decision that feels less like “stunt casting” and more like a contractual dare. She looks around, realizes what movie she’s in, and wisely gets out before the next round starts.
The Villains: Evil, Rich, and Boring
Sherilyn Fenn and Doug Jones play the sadistic masterminds behind this fight club for the terminally rich. Fenn, usually magnetic, delivers every line like she’s auditioning for Cruella de Vil: The Domestic Years. Jones, a usually mesmerizing physical actor, spends the film skulking around the control room like Nosferatu’s tax accountant.
Their motivations are never clear. Are they doing this for money? Power? Kicks? The thrill of watching women punch each other while Doug Jones whispers existential nonsense into a headset? The film doesn’t bother to explain — probably because it knows no answer could justify the premise.
By the end, you’ll wish they had just been aliens or vampires. At least that would’ve been entertaining.
The Action: Sweat, Screams, and Slow Death by Repetition
Here’s the thing: Raze does have decent fight choreography. You can tell the punches are landing (and probably actually did). The problem isn’t the action — it’s that there’s nothing else.
Each fight is staged with brutal realism, but after a while, realism gives way to exhaustion. There are only so many ways to show two women beating the hell out of each other in the same concrete cell before your brain starts checking its watch.
Director Josh C. Waller proudly claimed he wanted to avoid exploitation — and he succeeds, if by “avoid exploitation” he means “remove everything remotely interesting from exploitation movies.” There’s no humor, no camp, no style, no catharsis — just sweat, despair, and the faint sound of an indie film producer congratulating himself for being serious.
If Raze were a person, it would corner you at a party to lecture you about “the societal implications of violence” and then punch you in the face to make a point.
A Movie So Grim It Becomes Funny
There’s a special kind of irony in how Raze works so hard to avoid being sleazy that it accidentally becomes ridiculous. The film wants to say something about female empowerment — but its message seems to be “women are strong, and also doomed.”
Every time someone gives a motivational speech about survival, it’s immediately followed by a brutal death. Every time the camera tries to linger on grief, it instead captures the faint whiff of absurdity. At one point, a woman cries over her dead friend’s body, only to be dragged away for her next fight — it’s Schindler’s List by way of Mortal Kombat.
The movie is so humorless it borders on parody. If someone had just thrown in one-liners like “Welcome to the undercard!” or “That’s gonna leave a mark,” it might’ve been fun. Instead, everyone stares into the void as if auditioning for a Nietzsche biopic.
Visuals That Make You Miss Color
The cinematography is a gray-on-gray nightmare. Every frame looks like it’s been filtered through a used gym sock. The set design — all concrete walls and dim lighting — quickly becomes claustrophobic, not in a “we’re trapped” way, but in a “please let me out of this movie” way.
The soundtrack is a mix of low industrial hums and mournful strings, as if Trent Reznor accidentally wandered into a Lifetime movie. Combined with the grim visuals, it creates an atmosphere so depressing you could hang laundry on it.
Final Round: A Film That Loses by Technical Knockout
Raze wants to be a feminist action-horror statement. What it ends up being is a two-hour reminder that good intentions don’t make good cinema. It’s a movie that mistakes endurance for depth, suffering for storytelling, and blunt trauma for emotion.
Zoë Bell gives it her all, punching and bleeding her way through every frame like she’s trying to save the movie through sheer willpower. But even she can’t fight off the script’s relentless nihilism.
In the end, Raze isn’t empowering or enlightening — it’s just exhausting. It’s the cinematic equivalent of doing burpees in hell: sweaty, repetitive, and utterly pointless.
Verdict: One star.
Because while the fighters may have guts, the movie itself has none.
