fighting
Fighting

Starring:

Channing Tatum,Terrence Howard,Zulay Henao, Luis Guzman

Genre: Action

Rated: PG-13

Fighting tells the tale of Shawn MacArthur a homeless kid from Alabama who sells ipods and fake Harry Potter books on the streets of New York, When Shawn meets up with Harvey Boarden(Terrence Howard) a local street hustler, he gets introduced to the world of underground street fighting and dreams of a big payday.

Channing Tatum delivers a decent performance given his limited range ala Mark Wahlberg, the role however calls for very little emotion other than act calm or act angry. Terrence Howard does as good a job as can be expected given the limits of the story. He at least try’s to make Harvey seem sympathetic given Harvey’s history.

With a movie called fighting that runs close to 2 hours one would expect there to be quite a bit of fighting. Unfortunately there are a total of four fights. The movie is long on talking and short on both character development and fights. It takes an hour and a half to find out what happened between Shawn and is his father in college, which conveniently involves a pro fighter named Evan Hailey (Brian White) who just happens to hang out at the same club that Shawn does. There is also a Romance sublot involving a single mother waitress named Zulay (Zulay Henao) that does little for the story.

There are multiple problems with Fighting first being that Shawn never trains for any of his fights or works out yet is in great physical shape and gets better in each fight. We learn Shawn was a college wrestler, but in his fights he uses very little in the way of his wrestling skill. What Shawn is really good at is taking a punch. Shawn was selling Ipods and books on the street in his first fight, he wins 5,000 dollars and then he talks to Harvey about how badly he needs money even though he hasn’t spent a dime of his winnings.  The story is slow paced and nothing happens! There is little reason for you to root for Shawn or care about these people at all. Not to mention I counted at least 5 times I could see the Boom Mic enter the top of the frame. Fighting had potential but without much in the way of action or story this is barely worth a DVD rental.

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