In “The Bronze,” the abrasive character is Hope Annabelle Greggory, conceived and portrayed by Melissa Rauch, known for her sharp one-liners on VH1’s “Best Week Ever” and now as a squeaky-and-sassy nerd girlfriend on “The Big Bang Theory.” Hope is a former Olympic gymnast, celebrated in her Ohio small town for capturing the bronze medal back in the day. Now, her career prematurely ended by injury, she lives on dwindling endorsement earnings and by stealing money from the mail delivered by her postman father (Gary Cole). We first see the latter-day Hope lying in bed, masturbating as she watches the video of her prize-winning Olympic performance. As an orgasm-chaser, she snorts up a bunch of crushed-up painkiller pills. This sets the bar for the character’s abrasiveness, so to speak; nevertheless, one is still unnerved at the frequency with which Hope curses out her dad, and the way she refers to a former high school classmate with a neurological disorder as “Twitchy” to his face.
As it happens, co-writer Rauch and director Bryan Buckley know, or think they know, enough about movies to realize that they are obliged to create a redemptive story arc for Holly. So they do, to the extent that “Twitchy,” played by Thomas Middleditch of “Silicon Valley,” actually becomes Holly’s romantic interest as she softens up by training a young Olympic hopeful who could, Holly understands, steal her own small-town thunder. The movie’s jokes take uncertain aim at the shallowness and corruption of televised athletics. While there’s a certain potential irony in Upright Citizens Brigade-types getting snooty about jocks, as it were, this is not something considered in the movie’s philosophy.
The most talked-about scene in the movie comes near the end, in the form of a slapstick sex scene that’s rather like the one in “Team America: World Police,” with the novelty of it being enacted by actual people—the actors portraying the characters or maybe their stunt doubles or some combination thereof, the lighting makes it hard to tell—and it’s not only not particularly funny, it’s tonally so discordant from the already incoherent movie that it’s … well, “confusing” isn’t the right word. “Upsetting” isn’t, either, as one has kind of stopped caring by this point. Hard to say what the right word is. But it’s not a good one.
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