Perhaps that’s because all the characters in the film are complete idiots. Nothing they do makes any kind of sense. Shawn (mealy-mouthed pretty boy Channing Tatum) wins his first fight by banging his opponent’s head into a porcelain drinking fountain (the fight takes place in a school cafeteria, don’t ask) after he’d been getting his ass solidly kicked for a good five minutes. Afterwards everyone tells him how great a fighter he is and how impressive the victory was. What fight were they watching?
After the fight, everyone goes out to the club where Shawn runs into a girl he’d sold a fake Harry Potter book to earlier that week (the book is called Harry Potter vs. the Hippopotamus, which, while funny, doesn’t speak very highly of the intelligence of the girl purchasing it). They start a bizarre courtship that is threatened when it’s revealed that the girl has been secretly placing bets for Shawn’s manager Harvey (Terrence Howard, doing some kind of fey accent that is either an elaborate practical joke or one of the worst acting choices ever). Why that should be a big deal, I don’t know. Why she wouldn’t just tell Shawn about it, I also don’t know. And why Harvey is incapable of putting in his own bets, I really have no idea. I guess in order for the ‘twist’ ending to work it has to be that way, but really it makes not a lick of sense.
And it goes on like this for the whole film. No one does anything that makes the slightest bit of sense. People constantly run into each other all over town (and by ‘town’ I mean New York City, not exactly the kind of place where you’re likely to bump into people). Someone pulls a gun because someone else spilled their soda. The big bad champion just happens to know Shawn from when they were kids back in Alabama. It’s all nonsense.
That said, the way the characters talk to each other is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. A standard criticism of Hollywood movies, especially popular in film schools, is that they don’t depict reality as it really is. It’s this impulse that has led to just about every independent film of the last fifteen years being shot with handheld cameras and available light with dialogue that’s almost beside the point since it's really about what the characters are feeling. Fighting takes this idea of banal dialogue to an extreme. Characters say the same things over and over (like in a Mamet play but much worse), talk about nothing for minutes at a time and seem to barely even listen to each other.
In fairness, this style of dialogue does a decent job of depicting how people like this would probably talk in real life. The problem is that real life dialogue is, by and large, pretty boring. Think about any phone conversation you’ve ever had. The first couple minutes are probably small talk about how you and the other person are doing. Then you get into why you called and talk about that for a couple minutes. Then you ramble on, make a couple lame jokes, maybe gossip a little or talk about what television show you’re really into and then hang up. If that were put on film, it would be the most boring five minutes ever. And that’s pretty much what every scene in Fighting is like. It might be ‘real’ but it’s incredibly banal.
But you have to give Dito Montiel (a little bit of) credit for taking that idea and running with it. I have no doubt that every conversation between people like Shawn and his girlfriend would, in real life, be every bit as inane and stultifying as it is in the film. It’s impressive, in a way, that Montiel has so accurately depicted a bunch of moronic dullards. I just don’t want to watch boring people having boring conversations.
I could forgive a lot of this if the actual fighting scenes were in any way interesting or compelling. But they’re just paint by numbers; the same sort of thing we’ve seen in countless other boxing movies. There’s no sense that the fights actually take any sort of physical toll or are in any way dangerous. These are huge guys beating on each other with their bare fists and the worst that happens to any of them is a black eye or a split lip. And juxtaposed with the naturalistic dialogue, this completely unrealistic depiction of the physical aspect of bare knuckle boxing stands out even sharper. I mean, Shawn goes straight from the fight to the club for chrissakes. He doesn’t even shower.
That the boxing genre is so formulaic goes a long way towards explaining my general disinterest in most boxing movies while also explaining why any decent film about the sport has to be about much more than just what goes on in the ring (e.g. Raging Bull). Fighting, unfortunately, doesn’t have much of interest to offer either in or out of the ring. Nothing anyone does makes much sense. And nothing that happens is unique or compelling. It does get some points for having a unique style of dialogue, but since that style is incredibly annoying, it’s not enough to sustain interest past the first scene or two.
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