Movie Review: Melissa Rauch In “The Bronze” Is Surprisingly & Delightfully Vulgar

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A foul-mouthed former gymnastics bronze medalist must fight for her local celebrity status when a new young athlete’s star rises in town.

I am currently living for “The Bronze,” and the obsessively perfect bangs and killer scrunchie collection of Melissa Rauch’s Hope Ann Gregory. I never thought “The Big Bang Theory’s” Melissa Rauch could be so funny or so base. She nails it with her Tonya Harding-esque character Hope Ann Gregory, who is as uncouth and ridiculously self-centered as they come, which the opening scene quickly establishes as we watch Hope pleasure herself while watching old tapings of her bronze glory in a time warped bedroom of a former teenage girl and Olympic gymnast. Hope is our stunted villain/hero, who was once America’s small town sweetheart. Bitterness and delusion has aged Hope into an egotistical verbally abusive shell of a local celebrity that refuses to stop living in the haze of her glory days and scraping in the declining benefits. While the unlikable hero is not an unknown concept, Melissa Rauch’s Hope Ann Gregory holds her own in the canon of “bad.”

Broke and delusional, Hope rummages through her dad, Stan’s (Gary Cole), mail truck looking for cash stashed away in birthday cards, so that she may take her plunder and waste it on new kicks and scrunchies at the local mall. With cash running low in the Gregory house, Stan suggests Hope gets a job, a suggestion that which throws Hope into an obscenity laden tizzy. After cruising around her hometown, Hope catches word that there is a new star gymnast in the works, an adorably goofy and sweet teenage Maggie (Haley Lu Richardson) whose coach is Hope’s former, Coach P who trained Hope for her victory, and for whom Hope now holds a deep grudge.

Highly irritated by the thought that she could fade away while there’s a new hometown star on the rise, chance comes-a-knocking at Hope’s door after Coach P dies suddenly and a letter addressed to Hope from Coach P encouraging Hope to mold the coach’s current protégé, Maggie, into a winner for a large sum of money. Although sneering at the thought, Hope hops on the chance to make sure Maggie doesn’t impinge upon her local celebrity gravy train.

At her most despicable, Hope destroys Maggie under the guise of training her, using specific techniques opposite the stringent rules of Coach P. The gullible Maggie, takes pleasure in the gut busting food and the forbidden relations with a teenage boy Hope forces on her. The spritely Maggie is transformed into a dud and is completely devastated once she comes to. A rival trainer, Lance (Sebastian Stan), promises to transform Maggie back into the rising star that she is and a perturbed Hope is reminded that there’s no payout for failure. She quickly sways Maggie back under her wing for training part two. And this is where the surly veneer of Hope is slowly chipped away, revealing glimpses of compassion, pride, and a soft spot for the afflicted Ben (Thomas Middleditch).

It’s interesting to see Hope develop a softer side, realizing that she can slowly step beyond the bounds of her hardened teenage brat persona, with the help of love interest Ben, the sweet and morally upright guy that helps out at the gym and has had a crush on Hope since the old days. There’s a cute chemistry between the two that is surprisingly endearing rather than the usual annoyingly saccharin. And while there are still several missteps along the way to a new Hope, a breakthrough is finally made and it sticks.

While not a film for those who aren’t keen on heavy doses of crude humor and foul language, “The Bronze,” had me laughing non-stop and had me swimming in a sea of teenage nostalgia, conjuring the same feelings I had when I watched films of the late 90s and early 2000s, like “Drop Dead Gorgeous,” “Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion,” and “Napoleon Dynamite,” all which are charming, championing underdogs. And Hope, under that crass exterior, is ultimately an underdog.

In theaters March 18th