Review of I, Tonya (2017) by John A — 04 Mar 2018

Imagine Goodfellas on Ice. With having several unreliable narrators (Tonya herself, her husband and mother) we never truly get the full story which is kind of the point given that the dramatic story of Tonya Harding's life has a cloud of mystery about it. We get a very strong central performance from Margot Robbie- who desperately needed one after flops like Focus and Suicide Squad- her stand out scene which you may have spotted in the trailers where she's silently putting on her make-up in front of the mirror is simply engrossing.

The story thankfully stays clear of becoming a stereotypical 'Hollywood underdog sports movie', but I think we needed just a little bit more of Tonya at some competitions. Though dramatic, I think they could have extended the on-ice performances a tad. Just as you were getting into her performances...they ended. That said, the visual effects really made it look like it was Margot Robbie was truly performing the near impossible triple axel jumps. Could quite easily have done a dodgy photo-shopped head and we would have ended up with a Henry Cavill moustache moment.

What let the film down was that I felt it skipped over too much in passing, a lot like in Tupac's recent biography All Eyez on Me. Both suffered from maybe trying to cover too long a time period rather than focusing in on maybe a year or a few months.

A lot of time was spent in the first third of the film building the audiences' understanding of Tonya's fractured relationship with her mum (Allison Janney) but then she kind of disappeared from plot- as a true story this may have actually been the case but I don't believe that the pay off from a script point of view was worth it.

In the end I was a little disappointed and starting to check my watch to see how much longer I had to go until this ended. Would watch again on Netflix but wouldn't be eagerly waiting for it. 3/5.