Fighting (2009)
Directed by Dito Montiel
Small-town boy Shawn MacArthur has come to New York City with nothing. Barely earning a living selling counterfeit goods on the streets, his luck changes when scam artist Harvey Boarden sees that he has a natural talent for streetfighting. When Harvey offers Shawn help at making the real cash, the two form an uneasy partnership.
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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.