Fighting: Critic Reviews

Murderously dull stretches of dialogue suck most of the fun out of this sloppy drama about a country boy trying to make a buck in the big city by moonlighting as an underground prizefighter.

You might expect a movie called Fighting to be a blunt, literal affair, and in the case of Dito Montiel's new film, you would not be wrong.

You couldn't call Fighting great - at its core it is simply too cruddy - but Montiel has managed to inject it with the smell and feel of the streets that he clearly once knew well.

This story of a country boy who goes to the big city and uses his brawn to make his way is so slow it's almost inert.

As painful as the movie's bloody bare-knuckle brawls can be to watch, they don't hold a candle to the frightening spectacle of Tatum brooding or, yikes, Terrence Howard doing whatever it is Terrence Howard's doing in this movie.

The movie courses with the crazy energy and urban life that usually get sapped out of these tales of men beating the life out of each other. This one feels almost electrically authentic.

It's like an exploitation movie that thinks it's an art movie, only there's no art to be found.

By making good use of its New York setting, Montiel does bring a certain indie grit to the generic story.

At every turn, Fighting is alive and unexpected.

It is Tatum's performance that leads us to praise men of brute innocence.

The fights may not be very convincing, but the story's underdog structure is satisfying in a happy-cliche sort of way. Fighting is Rocky without the bombast, Fight Club without the daft metaphysical pretensions.

I like the way the personalities are allowed to upstage the plot in Fighting, a routine three-act fight story that creates uncommonly interesting characters.

The screenplay about a hunky street vendor turned underground fighter (Channing Tatum of Stop-Loss) is sloppy and false.

It's all footnotes, hardly any main story, and overcompensates by jacking up the violence.

Disarmingly entertaining.

Too dumb to be taken seriously and too slow to be a fun and mindless B flick, Fighting ends up being not much of anything.

For all the utter phoniness of Fighting... [it's] not so bad.

Fighting arrives fully charged by the charisma of its star, Channing Tatum.

The director plays a visual game of three card monte on us for this silly, weakly acted and yet sometimes entertaining variation on the 'Big Fight' movie formula.

Rock musician-turned-director Dito Montiel fails to make much of a fist with his second feature, Fighting, though he deserves points for trying to add some contemporary New York City grit.

Though by no means original or especially ambitious, Fighting turns out to be a surprisingly watchable B-movie.

Director Dito Montiel's jump from indie to studio film is mostly a successful one.

Yes, both Channing Tatum and Zulay Henao... have careers for their looks alone, and they'd have better careers delivering pizza than delivering dialogue.