Fighting

I don't remember the last time I have been this detached and felt this impersonal about a movie before. Fighting is a movie that's barely there, and hardly manages to generate anything resembling an emotion in its entire running time. The movie wants to tell the story of a young street hustler with a hard-knock life and past who manages to finally get respect by participating in illegal underground street fights. Problem is, the movie doesn't even seem to care. Not about the characters, not what they want, and strangest of all, not even about the fighting. If the movie were any more empty, there would be nothing to project onto the screen.

The film's hero is Shawn McArthur (Channing Tatum). While selling bootleg iPods and Harry Potter books on a street corner in the opening scene, he comes across two people who will change his life. The first is a woman named Zulay (Zulay Henao), who buys one of the bootleg books from him and will later become his love interest. The other is a fellow street hustler named Harvey Boarden (Terrance Howard). Harvey witnesses Shawn's fighting skills, and ends up introducing him to the world of underground street fighting, where a great sum of money can be made. With Harvey acting as his manager, Shawn quickly rises through the ranks of the fighting circuit. Perhaps a compelling narrative could have been crafted from such a bare bones premise, but director and co-writer Dito Montiel (A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints) has crafted such a plodding and inert film that it's impossible to care about anything. We don't even care about Shawn, since all we ever learn about him is he once beat up his dad back in college. This is used to fuel a rivalry with a fellow fighter who knows about Shawn's past, but it just doesn't work because the rival fighter barely has anything to do with the movie in the first place other than to get beat up at the end.

It would be one thing if Fighting came across as cliched or if it just seemed to be going through the paces. This movie doesn't have a pace. Or seemingly a pulse. It treats everything and everyone who enters the movie with the same level of indifference. The plot isn't there, the characters are largely interchangeable, and we learn so little about everything that's happening that nothing ever seems to matter. You'd think the movie would have the decency to tell us a little bit about the world of underground street fighting. How did these things get started? Why are there so many people involved? And how can they have these things in public (including inside convenience stores) without having the entire New York police force on their asses in a matter of seconds? The movie simply uses the world of these fights as a backdrop for a string of action sequences that could be counted on one hand total, and seem to be over in less than three minutes. The fact that Shawn never seems to be in any real danger of losing any fight he participates in certainly kills any tension these sequences might have tried to create.

A few weeks ago, I reviewed Fast and Furious and referred to it as "vapor". I now realize that I used that criticism too early. Fighting goes beyond being vapor to the point that it almost seems like a mirage. It leaves no impact whatsoever, has nothing to recommend for it, and simply seems like a giant waste of energy. I'm not talking about the actors up on the screen when I say this. I'm talking about the energy the theater uses to run the projector.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

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