Dito Montiel
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“Fighting” has a hook perfectly timed for the new Great Depression and recalls such previous films as “Hard Times” (1975) and “Every Which Way But Loose” (1979).
Although richly entertaining, the film could have benefitted from a deeper look into this forbidden world of underground human fighting, which hasn’t been explored much on-screen beyond the very unique take of David Fincher ’s acerbic Fight Club .
Settle for the Fight Club action instead.
With its ridiculously on-the-nose title promising all sorts of gerund-based action and the even-more-ridiculous trailers trying to position it as an unholy blend of “Fight Club” and “Step Up,” Fighting” looks and sounds like one of the dumbest things to hit screens since “Fast and Furious” (which was only a couple of weeks ago, I realize) and if it had stayed on that level, it might have made for a vaguely diverting 90-odd minutes of fenderhead cinema.
Where Fight Club's dark-alley scraps were used to comment on social emasculation, Fighting has nothing to say about men willing to pummel each other senseless.
"Fighting's" title puts aside any questions about the sort of genre story at hand, and to that end the filmmaker creates bare-knuckle fight sequences that have the kind of uncontained freestyle roaming quality of Martin Scorsese's celebrated bar brawl sequence in "Mean Streets."
Unfortunately, while Montiel may have been hoping that this approach would remind some viewers of the likes of “Mean Streets,” it will probably remind them more of a failed improv exercise in an acting class that ends with the teacher saying “Now Peter, I don’t understand what you were going for there at all.”
It’s a little like a grimy, street-level Ron Shelton movie, except in place of the would-be, has-been, or never-were athletic stars of Bull Durham, White Men Can’t Jump, and Tin Cup, Montiel’s characters exist far out on society’s fringes.
The movie also shows Gabriel and Devin after their tour in Afghanistan, searching for survivors in a post-apocalyptic America reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy's "The Road."
Dear John (2010)
Directed by Lasse Hallström
influenced by A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints (2006)
Part of the problem is Channing Tatum, an actor with the strengths and faults of early Sylvester Stallone: He can be a charming palooka, as in Fighting and A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints, or a block of wood, albeit one carved by God’s hands.
My favorite Channing Tatum performance to date was the one he delivered in A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints , but this one's actually pretty close to that level.
There’s a lunatic twinkle in him that in “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints’’ and “The Dilemma’’ had been demanding to be let loose.