I had never heard of Mildred Burke before settling down to watch Queen of the Ring. As a fan of professional wrestling both past and present, there’s really no excuse for that, as she was one of the pioneers of the art form and came up at a time where it was damn near impossible to be a self-made and successful woman. In a just world, this film should reignite her legacy for anyone interested in the sport, just as The Iron Claw reminded everyone about the tragic history of wrestling’s Von Erich family.
Burke was the first millionaire female athlete in history, putting her body on the line in the early days of professional wrestling when they would have to fight the marks at carnivals for a quarter a bump. While professional wrestling (or as it’s also called in 2025: “Sports Entertainment”) has a scripted storyline and finish, a lot of the moves are still physically taxing at best and insanely dangerous at worst. When a wrestler like Burke had a match against someone she wasn’t familiar with, the possibility of injury rose exponentially. There was a level of fearlessness to Burke that’s hard to even imagine, especially now.
Just as I’m hoping Burke becomes more well-known after the film, I’d be delighted if that carried over to the actress inhabiting her, Emily Bett Rickards, who has been a force of nature for years. Across eight seasons of the superhero show Arrow, Rickards was the heart of the entire series, stealing almost every scene she played. As Mildred Burke, Rickards brings that same warmth, but layers in a steely resolve and determination that gives Burke a depth that a lesser actress wouldn’t come close to finding.
Rickards’s performance makes Queen of the Ring, while the direction by Ash Avildsen (son of John G. Avildsen, the director of Rocky) is fine, if workmanlike. The lack of any noticeable style means we spend more time noticing a script that sometimes leans heavily into melodrama and cliché. In a biopic, that is sometimes to be expected, but some of the screenwriting shortcuts are so pronounced (like Burke watching a single wrestling match and then it becomes her entire life’s passion) that it’s hard not to roll the eyes a bit.
Queen of the Ring follows the arc of a traditional biopic like gospel: starting at the early days when the subject begins her journey shrouded with adversity, then discovering her passion in life, training to be the best, being underestimated by the world, having a brief and ill-advised romance, personal growth, overcoming a great obstacle, and then triumph. Following this blueprint can be fine (especially in a sports biopic), but the films that slyly subvert the tropes are the ones we remember.
Even at its worst, Queen of the Ring mostly still works based on its mesmerizing lead performance by Rickards and a great supporting cast with Josh Lucas leaning into his patented smug bravado, Cara Buono and her winking maternal warmth, Walton Goggins’s bottomless charisma, Deborah Ann Woll’s electrifying luminosity, and a star-making turn by Francesca Eastwood as the legendary Mae Young. In fact, the supporting cast is so stacked that Queen of the Ring probably would have worked better as a miniseries.
Still, the film is a lot of fun to watch, if for no other reason than to spend two hours in such a vividly realized world with this stunning cast playing these fascinating people. While there are many little things that could have made Queen of the Ring a stronger movie, the story itself is such an important and forgotten bit of sports history that getting to watch Rickards and company bring it all to life is still a blast.
Grade: B-
