Just when you think there’s nothing new that can be done with “The Big Fight” picture, “The Cut” comes along and finds all its drama in the preliminaries.

The latest film from the director of “Anthropoid” is a fascinating exercise in reinvention and minimalism. It’s about boxing, and there’s a fight in the brief opening scene and some sparring sessions are featured. But this movie set against that deadly, gladiatorial and CTE-inducing sport is about something almost as hellish as getting your brains beaten in by an opponent in the ring.

Almost the entire picture is about a washed-up fighter struggling to “make weight” so that he fight the Light Middleweight (or Super Welterweight) champ and change his destiny. It’s just a few days in Vegas, in a gym or a hotel room or toilet — sweating, extreme dieting, pill-popping and inducing vomiting — trying to drop almost thirty pounds in under a week so that he’ll be allowed the shot at that “comeback.”

Orlando Bloom plays our unnamed Northern Irish boxer. He had a bit of a breakdown in the ring ten years before, “prematurely” ending his career. Now he and his corner-woman Caitlyn (Caitriona Balfe) run a gym, teaching boxing to little girls and boys and making a life together.

But the leading contender just got himself messed up in a stunt-brawl with a Youtube boxer. With a huge fight pre-sold and set for the following week in Vegas, the promoter (Gary Beadle) is desperate. But it was the Irish boxer who called him, not the other way around.

“People like ‘a comeback story,'” Donny the promoter shrugs. Making the cut-off weight to qualify for the fight is “just a formality,” the fighter and his trainer-partner are assured. Yes, the fighter’s in shape. But he’s got a middle-aged spread, or just a hint of one. And he weighs over 180 pounds.

The cut-off for light middleweight? One hundred and fifty-four pounds.

“Just a formality” or not, Caitlyn pitches in, and they bring in a nutritionist and an extra trainer (Ed Kear) once they land in Vegas. But eating a couple of bits of carrot and an aspargus stalk or three and a severely limited diet of “fat, protein and water” isn’t going to drop almost 30 pounds in six days.

The promoter tells them they need The Boz. But that extreme step, they’re warned, means “TOTAL commitment.” Because this guy (John Turturro) is unscrupulous, heartless and maybe a tad mad.

“Your team, their problem is they CARE about you too much,” Boz purrs to them when they meet.

The Boz? He doesn’t give a you-know-what about their fighter’s health or even his life. The boxer’s haunted past, flashbacks to a childhood in Northern Ireland where mum (Clare Dunne, excellent) was a sex worker and “The Troubles” were ongoing?

Your past, Boz hisses to him, “is the extra weight” he has to lose.

“The Cut” doesn’t hit its stride until it’s just Turturro and Bloom, with Boz client and Boz True Believer Lupe (Mohammed Mansaray) along for extra motivation as a more deranged “make weight” partner in a hotel room, in the gym, in the sauna and in the tub urging himself, Boz and the Boxer into the realm of the extreme.

The Boxer’s issues aren’t cured by this intense environment as he hallucinates more and more memories of the trauma of his youth. The partner/trainer’s back-story — “The gym is what’s kept me clean!” — is under-developed, the opponent is barely mentioned.

What matters here is the body horror show that Boz has in store for them and us, and Turturro makes damned sure he delivers.

He is uncompromising and utterly callous about long-term effects, the health of a fighter or whether he might put him in the hospital. He is sexist. “We don’t have TIME for hysteria, sweetie. Your soft touch doesn’t apply.”

He is a motivational speaker, a seriously twisted life coach and a sadist. “COMMIT.” Go “All IN.” “Full throttle, full SWEAT” never seemed so scary.

As time winds down and the desperation grows, something or someone in this sweatbox trio is going to give. And not just blood, drawn intraveously “just to lighten you up a little bit.”

Turturro is great and Bloom is pretty damned committed, even if he isn’t the most convincing boxer you ever saw. The man was “cut” coming in, and he lost serious weight (over 50 pounds, if you believe the hype) to get an authentically gaunt look.

The suspense rises steadily with Boz’s blood pressure. The boxer’s vital signs? He’s barely able to stay upright.

The compactness of Justin Bull’s script is an asset, and anybody who’s ever tried to drop a couple of pounds to get into an old suit, last year’s shorts or a wedding dress can empathize with this dilemma and its degree of difficulty, even when you take things to the medical and life-threatening extreme.

But the preliminaries — brisk as they are — need to be raced through or skimmed over. The meat of the movie is basically a play, just three guys in a couple of settings, frantically trying to change their lives and life trajectories by losing as much weight as possible in an insanely short period of time.

Perhaps little more workshopping this script was in order, because the three main characters put on their own three act play in the film’s latter half. Everything that delays packing us in that pressure cooker with them undercuts the most novel version of “a boxing picture” that most of us have ever seen.

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse, nudity, “sexual content” and profanity

Cast: Orlando Bloom, John Turturro,
Caitríona Balfe, Mohammed Mansaray, Clare Dunne, Ed Kear and Gary Beadle.

Credits: Dirrected by Sean Ellis, scripted by Justin Bull. An Altitude/Republic Pictures release.

Running time: 1:36