Fighting

Channing Tatum has Heather Graham syndrome, which is to say unless his shirt off, there is just no point. He cannot act. He cannot even emote the most simple of emotions. He cannot really read lines to make them sound natural. He has no chemistry with any other actor and when asked to hold down a scene on his own, he falters. He looks good without a shirt, though. It might be possible that he understands his acting limitations because he finds himself in roles where he is required to take his shirt off a lot. For whatever reason this former model is on the verge of breaking into the big time, but until that day, he stars in movies like Fighting.

Sean MacArthur(Tatum) is just a young man trying to make a living selling crappy books on the streets of New York. His hustle is interrupted by some little thieves and Sean knocks them around a bit. Harvey Boarden(Terrance Howard) is the leader of that band of misfits and likes what he sees in Sean. Harvey is connected to some underground fight club thing and soon Sean is fighting for money. In his first match he gets a beat down, but wins by smashing his opponent into a water faucet. These are no rules fights. Before long, Sean is getting ready to fight for big money. Along the way he meets the super sexy Zulay, rhymes with July, but she has a kid, a nasty grandma and some serious money problems. Well, Sean, the sensitive lover that he is, helps her out with her money problems. Some other things happen that involve fighting and a pointless faux double cross, oh and we get a main villain. The villain, Evan Hailey(Brian White), was Sean's nemesis back home in Arkansas! Now they meet again in New York. For his final fight, Sean will battle Evan as Evan is the top dog in this sort of MMA fighting group. What will happen? Will Sean find the redemption he so desperately needs? Will Sean and Zulay hook up? Will Sean ever end a scene without losing his shirt?

We have a new entry in the pantheon of on-the-nose-movie-titles. Heist was about a heist, Snakes on a Plane was about, well Snakes on a Plane and Fighting is about fighting. Sadly, Fighting was not written by David Mamet like Heist and Fighting is not about Snakes on a Plane, like Snakes on a Plane. Instead, it is a muddled mess of a film that is as predictable as a movie could possibly be and inside that predictability it neglects doing anything even remotely interesting. Sean never really gets turned on, he is never in any real trouble and even his financial troubles are barely breezed over. His friendship with Harvey comes far too easily and their issues are too easily solved. They never really go at it and there is never a sense that Harvey is the real hustler he claims to be. I kept waiting for him to turn on Sean and give Sean a real reason to fight. Instead they are just chummy and Sean fights only because it is offered up to him. If he was offered a job waiting tables he would have taken that as well. It just kind of fell into his lap.

Channing Tatum fills out a tank top nicely and he looks good all sweaty and battered, and he is believable as a street kid looking for a fight, but his Sean is void of personality and he cannot even sex it up with Zulay and make it look hot. He is just so weak on screen. He is not helped by Terrance Howard. Howard is speaking like an effeminate Christopher Walken, refusing to the really commit to the scene or the movie. He is obviously looking for a pay check and he is not going to even try and do anything remotely interesting. As the villain, Brian White has a body chiseled out of granite and he can make a mean stare, but he is in a nothing part in a nothing movie and he knows it. All of the side characters are merely stock characters in every movie about young street hustlers.

Of course the movie is calling Fighting, so it should have awesome fighting, right? Well, it kind of does. There is one awesome fight a few alright fights, but the camera work is just so typical of a fight scene. Unfortunately, this director is not Paul Greengrass. The close ups are nice and there are moments when I really felt the hits or the slams into walls, but I wanted to be pushed further. I wanted to really get inside the fights and believe I was right there. The climatic fight is pretty cool, but it is made cool by the fact that they break through windows and the fight takes place in three different rooms, the fight itself is not terribly impressive.

The score is what works best in Fighting. The song choices are pretty good at capturing a version of New York, even if it was a bit borrowed from other New York movies. Having the Mash Out Posse as the soundtrack to your movie gives a sense of griminess I wish the rest of the movie had. But, more than the song choices, the original score worked for me. Before Sean's first fight, inside of having a loud or trippy score, we just get a quiet, but intense, piano driven score that really is effective in getting a sense of how Sean was going into his first fight. Then for his next big fight we get these awesome booming drums that play into the rhythm of the fight. If only the rest of the movie had been as innovative to make its point!

The worst thing for a movie called Fighting to be is boring, but Fighting is boring. I was over it pretty early on and it never recaptured me. I wanted to like it because fighting movies have a tendency to get my juices going, but this did nothing. If Channing Tatum ends up a big star, it will never be because of his acting skills and my guess is his reign will last about as long as Heather Graham's.

Final Grade: D