The Fighter
30 Dec 2010 Leave a Comment
in movie Tags: moviereview, The Fighter
After a bit of a movie hiatus (not just in not updating my poor neglected blog, but in actually not seeing movies for almost two months) I jumped back on the horse with a good one. The Fighter is an intense and hard, but also good film. I found myself a little surprised, because I care not for boxing. I find it a brutal past time, hardly worth calling a sport. Even if it weren’t for that, I’ve read articles here and there about the craziness of crowning a ‘world champion’ with the machinations of the different boxing sports federations vying with each other. All of that faded to the background for me for this film, mostly because it is a boxing movie in the way that ‘Million Dollar Baby’ is. That is, it uses the framework of a standard boxing tale to explore the effects of crack addiction and showcase an almost Shakespearean family drama. The cast is fantastic. Mark Wahlberg, Christopher Nolan, Amy Adams, and Melissa Leo are fantastic leads and the other actors fill out the action well. The top four though, are just so good and their roles are so conflicted and rich, it is a joy to watch them perform. It isn’t always a joy to watch though. The brutal family dynamics, including the effects of addiction/an addict as a loved one, can be as harsh as some of the punishingly painful boxing scenes. If there is any complaint to be made, it would be if you weren’t expecting a genre boxing film and found the obligatory clichéd ending too much to take. I think that is the wrong approach to take. I appraised the movie as an exceptional genre boxing film that stretches those boundaries and becomes a little bit more.
