Country: United States
Genre: Action/ Drama/ Romance
Director: Dito Montiel
Year: 2009
Rating: 
WORTH A LOOK
Oddly enough, in Fighting, the background action is more interesting than what the picture is ostensibly supposed to be about.
In it’s bare outline, Fighting couldn’t be more straightforward.
Harvey Boarden (Terrence Howard) happens to witness Shawn MacArthur (Channing Tatum) in a street fight and is impressed. He arranges a series of underground matches for increasingly high stakes. The only problem is that Shawn refuses to throw fights. The payout for the final fight is $100,000. Shawn agrees to throw the fight, but when the time comes, will he? Boring. We’ve seen this scenario many times already.
But writer/director Dito Montiel has something more interesting and personal in mind.
How did Harvey Boarden happen to see Shawn fight? Did he just happen to be passing by? Nope. You see, Harvey is a low-rent hustler. He’s such a bottom dweller that he was trying to hustle Shawn, who was hawking ipods and bootleg Harry Potter books near Rockefeller Center. Here’s how the scam works. One person pretends to be interested in Shawn’s wares. Another person distracts Shawn while a third person steals his bankroll. Shawn responds as best he can, beating the crap out of one of the scam artists while Harvey looks on.
To Harvey, Shawn is his ticket to the big time. He offers Shawn a chance to make some money fighting. Shawn isn’t too swift and goes along with it without knowing who his opponent is. For that matter, Harvey doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing either. Really, they are both losers, cruising for a bruising.
I love the way Terrence Howard plays Harvey as a shambling wreck with a line of patter that’s not nearly as smooth as he thinks it is. Shawn, on the other hand, is a typical highschool jock, heavy on the testosterone with not a lot going on between the ears.
We aren’t dealing with sharp characters here. That’s smart writing because if our heroes are in over their heads, there’s some actual suspense. They might well get hurt.
Writer/director Dito Montiel raises the stakes further by shooting in real locations in the Bronx and Brooklyn, using non-actors to give his scenes the stink of authenticity. There is real danger in the first half of the picture because we sense the unpredictability of real life.
Unfortunately, halfway through the picture, writer/director Dito Montiel loses his nerve and the picture reverts to a rehash of the moldiest genre conventions. If Montiel had stuck to his original intentions, he might have had something truly original, a street fight flick taking place in the real world, a place where the good guys don’t always win.
Still, the fighting sequences are engaging enough, even if the later ones become increasingly less innovative. And Fighting takes us places we haven’t been before. It kinda makes sense that there would be an underground economy in Manhattan that lurks in the shadows, just out of sight. If it weren’t for Fighting, I would have never known it was there. And it doesn’t just feel like an invention. The writing by Robert Munic and Dito Montiel has a specificity to it that feels like the real thing.
In the end, Fighting is entertaining enough, even if the pat and overly optimistic ending disappoints. This is the kind of picture where you take what pleasure you can in the ethnographic details, aura of danger, and engaging fight choreography and dismiss the rest as the warmed over garbage it is.
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