Fighting

Filmmaker Dito Montiel’s follow-up to A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Fighting follows scrappy street hustler Shawn MacArthur (Channing Tatum) as he’s lured into New York City’s underground fighting scene by a seasoned scam artist (Terrence Howard’s Harvey Boarden) – with the bulk of the proceedings subsequently revolving around Shawn’s efforts at landing bigger, more lucrative fights (as well as his ongoing attempts at wooing Zulay Henao’s Zulay). Despite the utterly (and hopelessly) routine nature of its storyline, Fighting, armed with a typically idiosyncratic performance from Howard, generally does an effective job of sustaining the viewer’s interest through its unapologetically repetitive opening hour. It’s ironically worth noting, however, that the movie is at its worst during its fight scenes, as Montiel’s inexplicable use of aggressively hyperactive visual tricks (eg extreme close-ups, rapid-fire editing, impossibly shaky camerawork, etc) transforms the majority of such moments into a meaningless jumble of images. And while there is admittedly one exception to this (Shawn’s battle with Cung Le’s Dragon has been infused with appreciative bursts of slow-motion cinematography), the relentlessly inept nature of what should have been the film’s highlight eventually proves too much for the remainder of the proceedings to bear. The oppressive lull in the build-up to the final confrontation, as Montiel and co-writer Robert Munic emphasize Shawn’s eye-rollingly dull relationship with Zulay, ensures that Fighting is destined to disappoint viewers hoping for an enthralling bit of brawl-centric entertainment, with the final realization that the total number of mano-e-mano confrontations add up to a paltry four (and about ten minutes worth of screen time) cementing the film’s place as an utterly worthless endeavor.

*1/2 out of ****