Fighting Blu-ray delivers great video and superb audio, but overall it's a mediocre Blu-ray release
Small-town boy Shawn MacArthur (Channing Tatum) knows firsthand that every day in New York City is a struggle to survive. So when scam artist Harvey Boarden (Terrence Howard) gives him a chance to be something more in the brutal underground world of bare-knuckle street-fighting, Shawn decides that he has something worth fighting for and puts everything on the line to win. Every knockout brings him closer to the life he's always wanted, but also traps him in a dangerous web he can't escape.
All sorts of clever clichés popped through my head as I was thinking about what to say about Fighting. A bantam weight failing miserably at an attempt for a heavyweight title. A film that's down for the count from virtually the first round. You'll be praying to be knocked out so that you don't have to watch anymore. You know, comments like that. But try as I might, I couldn't come up with anything that matched the cliché-ridden script of Fighting itself. You know what you're going to get in this film not just from its tell-all title, but from the opening scenes, when good guy Shawn (Channing Tatum) helps every little old lady in the subway and streets of New York he sees, only to get involved in a knock down, drag out fist fight when he supposedly tramples on the territory of street hustler Harvey (Terrence Howard). It doesn't take a correspondence course graduate of the Syd Field Screenwriting School to know what's coming next: Harvey will offer Shawn untold riches to fight in arranged matches. Shawn will have virtual moments of moral questioning, then agree. The woman (Zulay Henao, playing a character named Zulay, one of the better, if unintentional, laughs of the film) whom Shawn attempts to hustle himself in the opening scene will become his girlfriend. But she sure wishes he wouldn't, you know, get all bloody and stuff. Plus wouldn't it be cool if they could all just get out of fetid New York City?
Channing Tatum as Shawn MacArthur.
This is such a lamentable exercise in predictability it's virtually not worth spending time talking about. Except that it does in fact feature a couple of minor saving graces. Channing Tatum seems poised to become his generation's big action adventure star, and he shows real glimmers of depth here in a ridiculously written role, certainly no small achievement. He has the charisma and bearing to be a major romantic star as well, as his steamy scenes with Henao prove quite admirably. Director Dito Montiel, who made his way into films via a somewhat infamous history in punk rock, populates the film with an excellent array of generally impressive supporting players (though Howard is getting on my last nerve and seems poised to become even more of a Cuba Gooding wannabe than Gooding himself has become). The best thing Montiel gives this film is a visceral gut punch feeling for the streets of New York, especially working class streets. The grit and squalor almost reach through the screen at times, for better or worse.
As "seriously" as this film wants to take itself, ultimately Fighting comes down, not so surprisingly, to the fight scenes. And these are violent, in your face stagings that will raise the testosterone levels of young males while leaving a lot of the rest of the audience cringing in horror. Whether Shawn is fighting a Russian (what is this, Rocky IV) all of a sudden or various other street thugs, Montiel places his camera so close to the action you feel as if the poor DP is going to get sucker punched at any moment. Aided by a frequently bombastic soundtrack, these fight scenes raise the excitement level of the film at least marginally, something the rest of the purely dramatic scenes can't come close to matching.
Aside from the patently ridiculous plot and dialogue, the film is also hampered simply by it treading a path that everything from, yes, Rocky to Van Damme's Lionheart to Fight Club to, well, virtually any other film dealing with fighting in just about any context has already covered, and usually better than this one. If a filmmaker is going to revisit a time honored genre, he needs to bring something fresh to the mix, and about all that qualifies here in that regard is Tatum's undeniable appeal. You ultimately have to wonder why actors take on jobs like this. Is it just for the paycheck? Or do they see some redeeming value in it all that the rest of us mere viewing shlubs can't appreciate? As it stands (or as the case may be, falls), Fighting kisses the canvas pretty hard and deserves to be escorted out of the ring with its head bowed in shame.
Fighting offers a reasonable enough looking VC-1 1080p transfer with an OAR of 1.85:1 (which may display on your television as 1.78:1). While some aspects of this film are neatly crisp and sharp, notably close-ups, there's an overall softness to a lot of shots, especially midrange to long shots, that may bother some viewers. Grain is quite apparent, and verges toward the noise end of the spectrum on sky shots especially. Colors, while muted a lot of the time, are lifelike and well balanced, and black levels and contrast are especially impressive. A lot of this film features rain streaked city nightscapes, and Fighting's Blu-ray presentation really delivers the goods in this regard. Very occasional, slight line shimmer pops up from time to time on some of the skyscrapers and city backdrops, but this artifacting is fairly minor and very transitory.
What Fighting may lack as a film it at least attempts to make up for with one of the more aggressive DTS HD-MA 5.1 mixes in recent memory. This is a surprisingly nuanced soundtrack, at least when not pummeling the surround channels in the fight sequences. City noises nicely waft from channel to channel, and even simple effects like footsteps follow the action with precise directionality. Once we get to the fight sequences, all hell basically breaks loose, with each thunk of a fist meeting flesh delivered with some extremely reverberant LFE. There are also some fun sound effects here, as in the great porcelain "clink" when Shawn utilizes a convenient drinking fountain to knock out an opponent. Dialogue is always crisp and clear and the hyperdrive, bass heavy rock soundtrack is also excellently reproduced. In fact, Fighting is a lot more fun to listen to than to watch a lot of the time.
I guess we should thank the powers that be that we didn't have Dolph Lundgren and/or Brigitte Nielsen to kick around in this review. Fighting has some visceral action scenes, but they are weighed down by such trite writing and plot machinations that the film can't recover from the one, two punch of bad writing and tired circumstances. Channing Tatum is definitely a talent to watch and once he appears in a decently written film (sorry, I'm not counting G.I. Joe, you'll have to forgive me), his star will surely rise.
Universal Studios Home Entertainment has announced that they will bring the Channing Tatum film 'Fighting' to Blu-ray in the UK on September 28th, day-and-date with the DVD release. The disc will feature an extended cut of the film in 1.85:1 1080p VC-1 accompanied ...
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