Film Reviews & Movie Analysis

The biographical movie of Tonya Harding, promises to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth… mostly.

Tonya Harding (Margo Robbie) had a difficult life from the beginning; her family was poor and her mother’s love was debatable at best. Sadly for Tonya things went from bad to worse the day she put on a pair of skates and found her true love.

A natural on the ice, Tonya was competing and winning from the age of four and had her sights set on placing at the Winter Olympics. In the rink Tonya was the best but at home her mother (Allison Janney) never for a second let her believe she was special. The crippling realisation that she never would drove Tonya into the arms of Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan).

Life, like sports can be a competitive game, and when what you’ve been working your whole life for hangs in the balance, you have to ask yourself; how far you would go to get it?

Let’s get this show on the road by just outrightly addressing the elephant in the room; Allison Janney made this movie. She nailed the role of a no shit taking mother of an athlete, that we loved to laugh at but would probably kill ourselves over if we woke up one morning and discovered we were related.

Without her I, Tonya, was just a story told in a circle with no satisfying conclusion… but we’ll get to the bad parts later.

Staying on point with the good: Round of applause for Margo Robbie, not only for playing the titular character well, but for doing most of her own stunts!

I mean, heck no did she actually do the Triple Axel, but a lot of the routines, and general skating was all her. This meant that we didn’t have to sit through those awkward fake shots and pretend they weren’t fake shots when we all knew they were fake shots.

I’m not saying I, Tonya wasn’t cast well, just that they should have cast younger… or younger looking. Margo Robbie is twenty-seven and Sebastian Stan is thirty-five. They look good for their ages… but… they spend most of the movie being fifteen to twenty-four, and I, personally wasn’t buying it in the slightest even when they stuck Margo in braces and a tutu.

Can someone please tell me what actually happened in the movie though? For an biographical movie based around a single event referred to as ‘The Incident’, it was all a little underwhelming.

The majority of the movie was Tonya and Jeff in a bounce-back semi-humorous abusive relationship, while she had her ups and downs with skating both prior to and after ‘The Incident’. It honestly felt like these events were circling the drain again and again as I wished for them to move on to something else. Anything else.

One thing I was very confused about was the decision to break the forth wall. It was incredibly out of place as it didn’t match the movies tone and it came up randomly a third of the way in before being spattered oddly throughout. Plus if I remember correctly it wasn’t just Tonya that could break it, so nope; I didn’t care for that one bit.

I, Tonya was alright. It was a fun insight into the world of competitive figure skating and I could reach as far as to say that there were underlying themes of classism, misogyny, corruption in competitive sports and more obviously how a dysfunctional upbringing can have unforeseeable future repercussions.

But really all I got from the movie was that doing a Triple Axel is hella difficult and that men are actually trash.