NETFLIX NETPICKS: 'Card Subject To Change' relies on sucess of the 'The Wrestler'
Professional wrestling is a career path that is fruitful for very few, and destroys many more lives than it enriches.
This theme of pro wrestling as a destructive lifestyle is the basis of the 2010 documentary, “Card Subject To Change,” one it lifts from Darren Aronofsky’s critical darling, “The Wrestler,” starring Mickey Rourke.
This documentary, directed by first-time feature director Tim Disbrow, is impossible to watch and detach from that fictional representation of the same subject material.
“Card Subject To Change” is more of an overall portrait of small-time independent pro wrestling than a clear narrative, mostly existing to show all of the things that happened to Rourke’s Randy The Ram actually happens to real people. This is a lifestyle that people become addicted to, and it either becomes or ends their life.
There are three main story threads running through the film. The first deals with Johnny Falco, a veteran wrestling promoter who owns National Wrestling Superstars, which runs independent shows in the VFW and bingo halls of New Jersey — similar settings to that of “The Wrestler.” The second focuses on Kevin Sullivan, a veteran, semi-retired wrestler who owns a gym in Florida and is revered as a legend in the wrestling business.
The centerpiece of the film is the footage dealing with the late Michael Verde, who was 25 in the film’s earliest footage and began wrestling as “Trent Acid” at the age of 14. In the film, Verde is a talented and charismatic wrestler, popular in the East Coast territories, who has the looks of a WWE star. His personal demons and a downhill struggle with drug addiction keep him from moving up to that level.
Verde’s tragic struggle and downfall to drugs is this movie’s core.
If the film has a theme, it is addiction, and that wrestlers get just as addicted to pro wrestling as drug addicts do to drugs. Several wrestling veterans in the film, particularly Jim “Kamala” Harris and Terry “Sabu” Brunk, swear that they are just about to retire for good, that their bodies cannot take it anymore, but continue to wrestle to the present day.
Sullivan encapsulates the film with the statement, “You are born and you die on the independent circuit. You start there and you end there, and if you are lucky you have a run in between.”
There are several other notable appearances in the film, including Bill Moody, better known as “Paul Bearer,” and Dylan Summers, “The Necro Butcher.”
Summers can be remembered for being Rourke’s opponent in the pivotal “hardcore match” scene in “The Wrestler,” and his footage in this film is no less gruesome. At one point he is lifted off the mat after a piece of barbed wire tore a chunk of flesh out of his triceps, leaving a hole in his arm the size of a golf ball divot. All in a day’s work.
Brutal and heartbreaking, “Card Subject To Change” is also an unfocused, inelegant and meandering film that succeeds on its subject matter rather than the filmmaking technique used. This film is perhaps best viewed as supplemental to “The Wrestler” — you’ve seen the sad story, now see the sadder reality.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
