Fighting - 2009 Channing Tatum, Terrence Howard

"FIGHTING"




Always avoided this flick. The trailer for it is pretty bad and they even spelled Terrence Howards name wrong in the movie poster ::, but Channing has been growing on me lately and I figured I'd give it a shot when it came up on the channel guide.

Pleasant surprise. Not great, maybe not even good, but it had lots of good things in it. Terrence Howard was amazing in his part. I could have sworn he was channeling Al Pacino in Donnie Brasco. I've come to the conclusion Channing Tatum was never as bad as we thought he was. This flick was made 6-7 years ago, and he was fine in it. Played a confidant sort of sad sack palooka fairly well. We all assumed he was the next Paul Walker, Scott Speedman stiff pretty boy action star, but he was always just a little bit better then that.

So we have a great performance from Howard and good performances from Tatum and several of the supporting cast.

On to the bad news. The movie is called "Fighting". That's not good. There is also not an incredible amount of fighting in this movie. You would think a movie ballsy enough to name itself "Fighting" would really rub your nose in it..........but no such luck. There's barely any fighting at all. :nono:

They even have a cameo featuring Cung Le, and I said to myself, ok cool, this is going to be one long ass fight scene, otherwise they wouldn't have paid Cung Le to show up on set that day. Nope, that shit was over in less then two minutes.

Should have been R rated. You could tell by the style the director really really wanted to go all R rated grit with this, but they were forced to pull back, probably to try to attract the Channing Tatum "Step Up" teenyboppers.

Good news, the lovable Luis Guzman was in it. The bad news, he really phoned this one in, or just wasn't given much to work with, I couldn't really tell.

Also no training montages. How can you have a film called "Fighting" with no training montages? Plenty of plausibility issues throughout, but ahhhhh, who cares...the film is called "Fighting"!

All in all, worth it just to watch Mr. Howard practice his craft.


6/10