Review of Fighting (2009) by Chads — 29 Apr 2009

Jack(Channing Tatum) isn't fighting for a heavyweight belt, so keeping things in proportion is everything. There are no arenas, no hot lights, and no roaring crowds in this line of work: bare-knuckle boxing.

The venues are happenings, held at private homes and back alleys, on the fly, witnessed by an invitation-only gathering of lowlifes who find mixed martial arts too tame and regulated. Even when Jack is winning, he's losing.

"Fighting" is a sports film without glamour. As the bare-knuckle boxer moves up the ranks, the lack of prestige and gravitas for his accomplishments cast a pall of inconsequentiality over the victories.

The science isn't sweet, after all. No matter how many fights Jack wins, the drifter is still right back where he started from, because his street cred has no currency in the real world. Jack has a manager: Harvey(Terrence Howard), a two-bit hustler who finally has himself a winner, but tries to Terry Malloy his fighter by hedging bets like a bum.

Jack also has a prospective girlfriend: Zulai(Zulai Henao), a working single mother who deceives the fighter in a way that's not dramatically satisfying to the story. There's a revelatory moment between the three principal characters, but it's the wrong revelatory moment.

The boondoggle hatched by Harvey and Zulai isn't down-and-dirty enough to leave much of an impression. (SELF-POLICING SPOILER ALERT) "Fighting" errs by being a crowd-pleaser, even though the storyline cries out for some form of comeuppance towards the people in Jack's corner.

The film loses its proportion by making everybody a winner after the climactic fight. "Fighting" could have been, should have been, a contender.