Fighting: Film Review
When you buy a bar of chocolate, you expect chocolate. When you splash out on a new pair of shoes, you expect shoes. And so it is when you sit down to watch a film called Fighting, you expect a fair bit of fighting.
Say what you will about Snakes on a Plane, it had plenty of snakes on a plane and Big Nothing was well, big on the nothingness.
Fighting, on the other hand, has about as much fight as a hibernating squirrel.
Urban action flick..?
Director Dito Montiel clearly didn’t attend the Jean-Claude Van Damme School of underground fighting films. Montiel instead steers his vehicle away from its self-proclaimed premise and parks it in the ‘urban action flick’ zone.
This contemplative drama about underground fighting – a paradox if I’ve ever heard one – follows the story of small town boy hustling his way through the big city.
Shawn MacAuthur, played by Channing Tatum, quickly forms an uneasy alliance with a scam artist who inducts him into the violent world of bare knuckle fighting.
The fights, however, are few and far between and weak choreography means when they do come, they aren’t overly exciting or inventive.
It is perhaps unfair to lambaste Montiel for a new spin on the tired street fighting genre and his movie is admittedly far from terrible.
What it lacks is pace and conviction to its central premise – fighting. Consequently I was more frustrated than a monkey midway through a world banana shortage.
Blood and bone…
Fighting would perhaps have benefited from adopting a similar approach to the 2009 film Blood and Bone. Like Fighting, the premise is basic: an ex-con takes the underground fighting world by storm in a quest to fulfil a promise to a dead friend.
Simple, right?
Unlike Blood and Bone though, Fighting fails to accept the limitations of the genre in which it operates.
Blood and Bone is heavy on the Van-Dammisms and lighter on the urban drama.
Was it a stupid film? Absolutely. Was it unrealistic? I didn’t buy it for a minute.
Put simply, however, Blood and Bone was just more fun.
Seconds out, final round…
While Fighting precariously teeters on the edge of a pit of movie despair, it never falls in.
Be that as it may, Fighting is more Van Don’t than Van Damme.
Rating: 
– available on Blu-ray and DVD
Ross Wheatley
11:03 am, May 14, 2010
Being someone who isn’t a big fan of this film, i think your perception of the ‘fighting’ (as you may call it) scenes are totally on the money; they’re as exciting and enduring as a strip bar with no strippers, a milk bottle with no milk..
Great review though, Matt!
John1520
3:01 am, October 5, 2010
Very nice site!
Dorie
4:33 pm, July 23, 2011
If infortmaion were soccer, this would be a goooooal!