SALVABLE - Mark Reviews Movies

Salvable, Lionsgate

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 1, 2025

A fine, if familiar, story exists somewhere within the actual content of Salvable, in which a small-time boxer has to figure out how to make the best of a string of bad circumstances. He has lived in the same small town for his entire life. He has a failed marriage and a teenage daughter who barely tolerates the little time she spends with him. Sal (Toby Kebbell) could have been a contender in the ring, too, but something or other, involving a fellow fighter and his best friend, happened that almost got him in more trouble than he might have been able to handle.

Everything since then, apparently, has been an act of just trying to keep his head above water. Sal isn't doing that too well, either, as the aforementioned background of co-director Bjorn Franklin's screenplay should make clear, but the guy has a forthcoming match that could make him some money and, more importantly, might make people think he's still worth something as a fighter.

The movie, set in some cold and dreary and remote part of Wales, looks and feels convincing as a low-key character study of this man. In Kebbell, Franklin and co-director Johnny Marchetta (with both making their feature debut) have a leading man who appears as if he's dangling from his last metaphorical thread at every moment, too. His performance is quite good here, so it shouldn't reflect on the actor that the role he's playing simply seems to exist to look defeated and downtrodden. The screenplay throws so much at the poor guy that it's surprising we can see that much of him, considering just how many complications and burdens are piled in front of him.

There's not much more to Sal, apart from the fact that he's a generally decent man who just has bad luck and bad judgment when it comes to whom he trusts, than these problems, and there's not much more to the story than those obstacles, too. A movie as small, deliberately paced, and tightly focused as this one lives and dies by its little details. The ones here are overshadowed by the filmmakers trying to make something bigger out of the material.

The biggest obstacle to this story actually being about Sal, his miserable life, and his efforts to get out of the pit in which he has lingered for so long is, perhaps, a single plot point. That would be the sudden appearance of Sal's old pal Vince (Shia LaBeouf), another boxer in this town who had a shot at the Olympics alongside our protagonist. The screenplay's a bit vague about what happened and didn't happen for the dreams of those two, although, since Sal is in his current position and Vince does have to return to this place after a long time away, we can gather that it didn't work out at all for either of them.

The most basic of the basics of the back story here comes by way of Sal's coach Welly (James Cosmo), who worries when he hears that Sal has reunited with Vince and been spending some time with him. Vince is still trouble, the coach warns, and sure enough, Sal gets the hint when his old friend offers him an easy "job" for a lot of money. Sal definitely knows Vince is still up to his old criminal ways when he decides to ask for a little monetary help. Vince helps to run an underground fighting ring in the area, and it's a brutal, no-holds-barred circuit that makes and loses people a lot of money—and puts fighters in the difficult position of being beaten nearly to death to make cash for others.

None of this subplot quite fits the rest of the story, which is far more grounded, much less extravagant in terms of its stakes, and actually feels like a depiction of the sorts of everyday problems a washed-up boxer would have to deal with while trying to prove to himself and everyone else that he's still worth something. Sal is just trying to get by, living out of a prefabricated house in the middle of a field, working at a senior care facility in town, and legally battling his ex-wife (played by Elaine Cassidy) for more time with their daughter Molly (Kila Lora Cassidy, the real-life daughter of her on-screen mother, by the way). The father-daughter relationship, as the two find common ground and each realizes there's more to the other than they thought, possesses a good deal of sincerity in only a few scenes.

Since it's what Sal is fighting for the entire time, one would expect that relationship might be more significant to this story, but instead, Franklin's script lets Vince and his criminal enterprise take over from the second act onward. Salvable keeps upping the stakes of its plot, as the allure of that "job" starts to look too worth the cost for Sal to pass on it, but none of that is as compelling as the promise of this character under much simpler but still-dire circumstances.

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