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By-The-Books Brawls In Eccentric NYC
Rating: One & 1/2 Stars
By JONATHAN L. FISCHER, The Bulletin
Inevitably, the only realistic litmus test for a movie called “Fighting” has to be, well, the fighting. This gritty New York piece directed by Dito Montiel (“A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints”) has four underground street fights (and some stock plot points tailored to navigate us from one brawl to the next). Yet three of these end anti-climactically, and all are cropped too tightly for the audience to decipher who is punching whom and where.
No one expects a film like, say, “Fast And Furious” ($138,520,415 in ticket sales and counting) to deliver Tolstoyan narrative; all it needs to do is race and explode its cars in the right order and with gusto. The stakes for a movie like “Fighting” are equally low: If it can kick enough you-know-what and do it in a proficient way, the film has fulfilled its mission statement. So why does it seem that these days, serious filmmakers like Darren Aronofsky (“The Wrestler”) are outdoing their B-movie peers when it comes to staging a convincing fight scene?
(A quick aside: Each fight in “Fighting” has a tone appropriate to the borough in which it is set, which of course begs the question, What would a Staten Island match look like? Ferry riders batting each other with briefcases?)
Rock-jawed Channing Tatum, who you’ll be seeing a lot of this summer in films like “G.I. Joe” and “Public Enemies,” stars here as Shawn MacArthur, a young, Southern fish-out-of-water who comes to New York to make his fortune, and quite efficiently ends up in the hands of a fight promoter played by Terrence Howard. Shawn has a mysterious past, as well as a childhood rival (Brian J. White) who, conveniently, is also in New York, and who also fights on the underground circuit. Guess who Shawn’s going to spar with in the film’s penthouse climax?
Everything unfolds as expected, with lackluster fight sequences and the hammiest romance I’ve seen at the movies this year. Which is a real shame, because it obscures what there is to like about “Fighting”: Mr. Montiel’s eccentric take on a contemporary New York City that feels like an older generation’s, and the performance of Terrence Howard. As a down-on-his-luck hustler, Mr. Howard doesn’t try too hard to mask his boredom, yet nevertheless puts far too much thought into his lines than the film deserves. His character, Harvey Boarden, is in equal measure manipulative and ill-at-ease, possessing a sort of slurring, insouciant charisma that occasionally distracts from the cinematic dross around it.
What a bummer. A little more of the old, weird New York, and some more actors on the level of Mr. Howard, and “Fighting” could’ve been a contender.
Jonathan L. Fischer can be reached at jfischer@thebulletin.us
No one expects a film like, say, “Fast And Furious” ($138,520,415 in ticket sales and counting) to deliver Tolstoyan narrative; all it needs to do is race and explode its cars in the right order and with gusto. The stakes for a movie like “Fighting” are equally low: If it can kick enough you-know-what and do it in a proficient way, the film has fulfilled its mission statement. So why does it seem that these days, serious filmmakers like Darren Aronofsky (“The Wrestler”) are outdoing their B-movie peers when it comes to staging a convincing fight scene?
(A quick aside: Each fight in “Fighting” has a tone appropriate to the borough in which it is set, which of course begs the question, What would a Staten Island match look like? Ferry riders batting each other with briefcases?)
Rock-jawed Channing Tatum, who you’ll be seeing a lot of this summer in films like “G.I. Joe” and “Public Enemies,” stars here as Shawn MacArthur, a young, Southern fish-out-of-water who comes to New York to make his fortune, and quite efficiently ends up in the hands of a fight promoter played by Terrence Howard. Shawn has a mysterious past, as well as a childhood rival (Brian J. White) who, conveniently, is also in New York, and who also fights on the underground circuit. Guess who Shawn’s going to spar with in the film’s penthouse climax?
Everything unfolds as expected, with lackluster fight sequences and the hammiest romance I’ve seen at the movies this year. Which is a real shame, because it obscures what there is to like about “Fighting”: Mr. Montiel’s eccentric take on a contemporary New York City that feels like an older generation’s, and the performance of Terrence Howard. As a down-on-his-luck hustler, Mr. Howard doesn’t try too hard to mask his boredom, yet nevertheless puts far too much thought into his lines than the film deserves. His character, Harvey Boarden, is in equal measure manipulative and ill-at-ease, possessing a sort of slurring, insouciant charisma that occasionally distracts from the cinematic dross around it.
What a bummer. A little more of the old, weird New York, and some more actors on the level of Mr. Howard, and “Fighting” could’ve been a contender.
Jonathan L. Fischer can be reached at jfischer@thebulletin.us
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