Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
Going into writer-director Dito Montiel's second film (after the impressive A GUIDE TO RECOGNIZING YOUR SAINTS), I thought I had this one figured out just based on the casting. Seeing Channing "Mumble Pants" Tatum in the movie's trailer doing his tough-on-the-outside/squishy-on-the-inside routine immediately made me recall his less-than-deep work in STEP UP and cameo in the sequel, STEP UP 2: THE STREETS. But weirdly enough, the movie FIGHTING doesn't feature that much actual fighting--I think the final count is four, including one that gets interrupted midway through. There is no fancy martial artistry going on here. Tatum's Shawn MacArthur is a former high school or college wrestler (I could never quite get that straight) who knows how to scrap in the streets. The bare-knuckle brawls last only a couple minutes, and are about as savage as they come, but they hardly make up the bulk of this film.
Instead what we get is an admirable, if not entirely successful, attempt to actually create and develop a few characters in a setting that does its best to look and feel like a film made in the 1970s, complete with a cool, old school R&B soundtrack and a gritty atmosphere that often appears as though Montiel simply tossed his actors on the streets of New York City and let them play out their scenes among the civilian population. Throw in what sounds like a whole lot of improvised dialogue, and you get something more experimental and daring than you might at first expect.
Shawn is essentially homeless as he peddles what few goods he is able to collect on the street for money. When a couple of rip-off artists rob him blind, he retaliates by kicking a few of their asses pretty soundly. He still loses his money, but when he spots one of the players, a fast-talking hustler named Harvey (Terrence Howard from HUSTLE & FLOW and formerly of the IRON MAN franchise), the two men have a conversation that leads to Shawn lining up an amateur fight that he wins with much force. The two men use each other to make money, but they quickly become something resembling friends. Soon to be seen again in both PUBLIC ENEMIES (as Pretty Boy Floyd) and G.I. JOE, Tatum does a pretty solid job playing a guy who moved to New York from the South, and has had to learn to survive and fight back when necessary. It helps that he's under Montiel's guidance once again; his performance in SAINTS is still the best thing he's ever done. And Howard isn't half bad either. I like seeing him as something of an underdog, a man who crossed his business partners (played by the indelible Luis Guzman and Roger Guenveur Smith) years earlier and has been attempting to re-establish some credibility ever since. He manages to encompass both stark confidence and masked timidity.
The characters in FIGHTING actually do grow and discover what is truly important in their small corner of the world. Shawn falls in love with a club waitress (newcomer Zulay Henao), and the relationship gives him some of the strength he needs to conquer his demons (which seem to date back to a fight he had with his father). But to get to the place where he needs to be, he must first fight an old rival played by Brian White (12 ROUNDS, "The Shield") in a contest Shawn is told he must lose to keep his life. The film has an ending that is as dopy as I found it predictable, and I guess that's the problem I had with most of the movie. When you have characters whose lives aren't that interesting (hell, their personalities hardly seemed totally formed yet), having the actors playing those characters improvise lines seems pointless. Most times, the characters just murmur words to each other that in no way resemble actual conversation. Howard and Guzman handle this task better than anyone else, and that's simply because they are the two best actors in the cast. Tatum has a handful of nice moments, but he flounders more often than he succeeds.
Dito Montiel does a really great job establishing the mood for FIGHTING, and when the performances were lacking, I enjoyed watching what else was going on on the screen. There are real bits of New York in this movie; it's practically floating in the air. And that adds a great deal to the authenticity of the entire piece. But the wandering way the dialogue is presented is awkward and off-putting. You could do a lot worse than FIGHTING, and I applaud Montiel's skill with the camera, but he needs to rein in his actors a bit more and make them do at least one take with the script actually open in front of them. This is a noble failure, but a failure nonetheless.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcoolmail.com
