Montiel 'fighting' tough, gritty - and slow
Dito Montiel's "Fighting" is a tough and gritty urban survival tale full of sincere, low-key performances and a funky, percussive score that could have been ripped right out of a vintage 1970s blaxploitation action drama at the old Woods Theater.
The main character, a young street brawler with plenty of nuttin-to-lose attitude, never pulls his punches. Yet, Montiel does, resulting in a too-familiar story fitted with a slow-burning fuse that never quite gets around to detonating anything.
This poor man's "Fight Club" seems like an odd choice for Montiel's second movie. His first, 2006's "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints," was another gritty but much more internal drama about a street kid believing that saints saved him from a bad life.
"Fighting" follows the rags-to-riches story of a Birmingham, Alabama, transplant named Shawn MacArthur, played by Alabama-born actor Channing Tatum.
Shawn still suffers from a mild case of culture shock. He ekes out a living selling junk on the streets near Radio City Music Hall in New York. When a couple of local thugs try to steal his stuff, Shawn wallops the bejeezus out of them.
Harvey Boarden, played by Chicago's own Terrence Howard, watches the action, and his street hustler senses tingle with giddy excitement. He proposes a business deal to young Shawn. If he'll fight in locally arranged illegal street matches, Harvey will manage him. For a fee, of course.
Shawn, one of the cinema's classic, stoical quiet men, is slow to warm to the idea of fighting for Harvey the hustler, especially since those thugs he whupped belonged to him.
United by their mutual desire to survive, Shawn and Harvey become symbiotic buddies. Soon, they're making real waves in the illegal fighting subculture of New York, bouncing from one bout to the next, with everyone always underestimating the outsider kid and his smooth-talking manager.
By making Shawn virtually invincible in every single match, "Fighting" robs us of our vicarious concern for his safety. Sure, some of his bouts turn ugly and highly visceral - captured in confusing, too-tight, blurry shots a la the Jason Bourne films - yet there's never a moment where we sit on our hands, agonizing that something tragic will happen to him.
Likewise with the story's obligatory romantic subplot in which the inarticulate jock hero falls for a cute, single Hispanic mother, Zulay Valez (Zulay Henao), struggling to make ends meet. Henao and Tatum infuse their scenes with as much romance as they can muster, but to little avail.
Montiel's lethargic direction flattens out the emotions instead of identifying them, inflating them and exploding them on the screen.
Shawn comes equipped with a tragic back story and some bad history with a physically imposing boxing champion (the startlingly charismatic Brian White), all of which feels as if the writers (Montiel and Robert Munic) tacked everything on as an afterthought to give the characters more texture.
The best line? Shawn asks the obsequious Harvey where he's from.
"I'm from a place with real culture," he replies. "Chicago."
"Fighting"
Rating: 2 stars
Starring: Channing Tatum, Terrence Howard, Zulay Henao, Luis Guzman
Directed by: Dito Montiel
Other: A Universal Pictures release. Rated PG-13 for language, sexual situations, violence. 105 minutes.