Ignore the trailer, which showcases a bare-chested Channing Tatum shadowboxing on a lonely subway car. This isn’t exactly a story about a guy searching for glory in the ring. Tatum plays Shawn, a flat-broke Manhattanite who sells counterfeit junk to tourists. He isn’t all that interested in fighting, but selling knock-off iPods and non-existent books like Harry Potter and the Hippopotamus isn’t paying the rent. When two-bit hustler Harvey (Terrence Howard) offers to help him make an easy $5,000 in the world of underground brawling, Shawn accepts.
Fighting, as it turns out, makes for easy money, and Shawn keeps coming back as the purses keep growing. Along the way, he falls for lovely Zulay (Zulay Valez), and tries to keep his new dirtbag friends at arm’s length. Writer-director Dito Montiel has made a film of surprising depth in Fighting, and
much is owed to its lead character. Shawn is interesting: Even at the
height of his short career as a fighter-for-hire, he’s not in love with
the accolades, the rush of combat or any of the trappings of his new
success. He just fights because… what else is he going to do? This
gives the tried-and-true underdog story a fresh angle, and hanging it
on Tatum’s performance proves to be a smart move. He’s likeable and
believable in the lead role, exuding quiet confidence and aimlessness
in equal measure. You want the guy to get what he wants, but you also
know he has to figure out what that is first.
He reminded me a bit of Zach Gilford’s beaten-down quarterback in the “Friday Night Lights” TV series, only cockier. If Fighting has a major fault, it’s that it falls back on a pretty standard structure (bout, drama, bigger bout, more drama, rinse, repeat) culminating in the clash of two old rivals. The film cheapens itself a bit by setting up a one-dimensional villain in Evan (Brian White), Shawn’s old nemesis from his days as an Alabama college wrestler, who just happens to have ended up in the same NYC zip code, not to mention the same underground boxing circuit. Indeed, the entire story of how Shawn ended up in New York feels like an afterthought — after a falling out with his father, he left college and the South to get lost in the big city — and it’s one of Fighting’s only weak points.
But Montiel compensates by giving his film a clever script and staging some gripping action sequences. These fights hardly seem choreographed at all — they’re messy, brutal and look more like riots waiting to happen than actual matches. I haven’t seen scrapes like this since Fight Club. The whole film takes place amid the noise and clutter of modern New York City, and kudos to Montiel and his director of photography, Stefan Czapsky, for really capturing the essence of city life. The crowded streets, the music, the storefronts full of cheap knick-knacks and the back alleys full of graffiti and refuse — this isn’t a tame, sanitized Gotham. The city is a character in itself, the real backbone to the film, and the main reason that there’s more to Fighting than the fighting.
