NewEnglandFilm.com

Director Ziad H. Hamzeh’s "Shadow Glories" begins with a man’s struggle through a swirling current of waist-deep water, its surface aglow in an infernal red color, his gasps echoing though a nightmarish maze of underground tunnels. The images and sounds shift and collide into a kaleidoscope of desperation and fury. It’s a haunting scene, and it provides a memorable opening to a memorable film.

The man we see is Simon Penn (portrayed by screenwriter Marc Sandler), and he is a middle-aged kickboxing instructor, a retired professional fighter. To those around him, he seems the epitome of calm and reserve, but at heart he’s obsessed with his own darkness. That part of him he needed to tap into the animal rage necessary to win fights threatens to overwhelm him and yet his philosophy with his students is that "we learn to fight so that we don’t have to." The film makes it apparent he’s taken most of his life to believe this.

The fragile stability he’s created for himself is threatened by a female colleague, CJ Keyes (Sarah Rachel Isenberg), who wants to enter the professional kickboxing circuit – and wants him to coach her. To make matters worse for Simon, she not only hopes to take on female challengers but also his past rival and reigning male champion Eddie "Killer" Kosinski (Michael Denney). She brushes aside his feeble attempts to talk her out of it, and together they begin her quest. At the same time, he tries to renew his relationship with his wife Jenny (Linda Amendola), from whom he has been separated.

All the makings are here for your typical fight film, but "Shadow Glories" thankfully avoids many of the expected cliches and heads for uncharted territory. Crippled early on by an over-reliance on voiceover (after the initial harrowing scene, things quiet down, and Hamzeh and Sandler feel the need to keep verbally reminding us of Simon’s dark side rather than conveying it visually), the film gets back its urgency once the fights begin. CJ lets herself go, spiraling further out of control with each bout, and Simon’s grip begins to falter. "Shadow Glories" is hardly your everyday fight film. Rather, the sparring between opponents is overshadowed by the characters’ internal struggles to control the ferocity at their core -and by Simon’s struggle with fate, his fight to keep from fighting, and his race to stay ahead of the darkness within.