REVIEW: ‘Queen of the Ring’ Is Emily Bett Rickards Like You Haven’t Seen Her Before

Women’s professional wrestling is having a moment. With more women headlining promotions and getting the well-deserved spotlight based on their athletic skill and not just their looks, Queen of the Ring takes a look at where it started. Directed by Ash Avildsen, written by Alston Ramsay, and adapted from Jeff Leen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biographical book of the same name, the film begins in the 1930s and follows Mildred Burke’s impact on professional wrestling through her life as much as her fights.

Emily Bett Rickards’ voice as Mildred Burke opens Queen of the Ring by explaining what women in the 1930s were expected to be. They were expected to be beautiful, to be mothers, to be wed, and not to have muscles. Burke doesn’t ascribe to any of these expectations, and even when she does, she doesn’t do them the “right” way. She’s a mother, but she’s divorced. She’s beautiful, but she’s muscular. She wants to be a mother and a wrestler. She wants a life that is her own.

Throughout the film, Avildsen uses Mildred’s career as Millie Burke in the ring to chronicle her groundbreaking journey to conquering the male-dominated world of professional wrestling. First, she wrestles men at carnivals across the South, thanks to laws banning women from wrestling. She forces her way into the ring and makes the men respect and love her. So much so that she falls in love with her promoter, Billy Wolfe (Josh Lucas). As Mildred’s star ascends, she and Wolfe are credited with bringing women athletes to the forefront of entertainment.

As they revolutionize professional wrestling under the name the “Wolfe Pack,” Mildred’s dream becomes even harder to achieve. At first, the duo are a team until infidelity shakes up their engagement. To keep their success alive and equal, the two marry. But infidelity still follows. The movie promotes the names of women who pioneered the sport—especially Mildred herself—and the barriers they shatter. But more so, Queen of the Ring captures the frustrations and indignities that they suffered along the way.

In addition to Arrowverse’s Rickards, the cast includes Josh Lucas, Walton Goggins, Francesca Eastwood, Tyler Posey (Teen Wolf), Marie Avgeropoulos (The 100), Deborah Ann Woll (Daredevil), Cara Buono (Stranger Things), and Martin Kove (Cobra Kai), Damaris Lewis (Titans), and Gavin Casalegno (The Summer I Turned Pretty). Each of them brings their best, even if they’re only given a little to work with at times.

Queen of the Ring brings icons of wrestling to the big screen with Jack Pfefer (Goggins), Gorgeous George (Adam Demos), Babs Wingo (Lewis), Gladys Gillem (Woll), June Byers (Kailey Farmer), Ethel Johnson (Trinity Fatu, known as Naomi). Clara Mortensen (Toni Rossall), and Marva Scott (Cameren Jackson), although the last two don’t get as much screen time or name recognition as they should.

The cast of Queen of the Ring makes it easy to find favorites.

Across the cast, it’s easy to spot favorites and continuously root for Burke as everything stacks higher and higher against her. The Queen of the Ring excels by making sure to show that Mildred Burke and the other women were athletes and pretty Faces (or Heels), not just one or the other. The filmmakers praise their athleticism even when the culture at the time was to reduce them to their lipstick.

With its focus on a pioneering female athlete, Queen of the Ring highlights the physical endurance, determination, and sacrifices that defined Mildred Burke’s legacy. One of the film’s focal points continuously reminds the audience that Mildred is a mother. She works for her son; she tries to protect him from the men around her, and ultimately, he is one of the few men she can trust. It can have a serious impact on women who are told repeatedly that they have to give up on their dreams after they give birth.

Queen of the Ring doesn’t revolutionize the biopic. In fact, at points, it’s burdened by the expectations of the genre. The edges often need to be rounded out in biographies, especially ones about someone with a scale stacked against them. In this case, it’s not Mildred who is entirely sanitized, but who exactly is allowed to wrestle and what happened to women’s wrestling after her.

The film ends by highlighting Mildred’s success in Japan and noting that Babs Wingo (one of the three Black sisters featured wrestling with Mildred Burke) was the first Black women’s champion in an interracial match. However, it also leaves Wingo, Ethel Johnson, and Marva Scott almost unnamed. The reality is that women in wrestling, more specifically Black women in wrestling, have only recently begun to be recognized as more than their stereotypes after the catfighting style of showmanship became dominant for female wrestlers in the WWF/WWE.

Given how hard Mildred Burke had it in her life and career, pointing out the steep mountain that other women would have to climb in the following years doesn’t undo any of her accomplishments or impact—not because Burke didn’t accomplish anything as the first million-dollar female athlete but because her mountain was even steeper.

The most frustrating thing about Queen of the Ring is its manufactured drama with the death of a character who actually lived to become one of the stand-out women in the documentary Lipstick and Dynamite, Piss, and Vinegar: The First Ladies of Wrestling. It’s egregious if only because the woman grew old and lived a full life, having wrestled alligators, tamed lions, and become a trapeze artist after she stopped wrestling.

Queen of the Ring doesn’t escape some biographical pitfalls when contextualizing Mildred Burke’s history.

While Emily Bett Rickards’ physical transformation into Mildred Burke is astonishing, the film widely embodies existing ideas of feminine beauty, especially compared to who Burke was in real life. That said, with so few actresses being given the chance to develop muscular figures, something that HBO’s The Last of Us Season 2 casting choice for Abby showed, it is a step in the right direction. This is further addressed by casting real-life women professional wrestlers in supporting roles.

Rickards doesn’t just show up physically for her athletic performance. She also brings heaps of emotion to the film. Knocked down but never out, her ferocity and resiliency keep her moving forward even when the men around her beat her down.

By and large, though, Queen of the Ring tackles its subject matter the way you would expect a biopic made to teach even uninterested people about it. That isn’t bad, but it leaves those of us seeking a little more of the commentary in a rut.

Ultimately, though, the film’s subjects also keep it as something to watch. When the exchanges between Mildred and Wolfe become frustrating, the athleticism in the ring and the choreography of the bouts are more than enough to keep you cheering even as you slowly move from one melodramatic plot point to the next.

Ultimately, though, Queen of the Ring just has to entertain and make people curious about the start of women’s wrestling, and it does that. The film is a look at the birth of women’s wrestling through Mildred Burke, with Emily Bett Rickards as you’ve never seen her before.

Queen of the Ring is in theaters and VOD now.