5.8 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
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.
Starring: Channing Tatum, Terrence Howard, Brian J. White, Luis Guzmán, Zulay HenaoThriller | 100% |
Action | 99% |
Sport | 30% |
Drama | Insignificant |
Video codec: VC-1
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
French: DTS-HD 5.1
German: DTS-HD 5.1
Italian: DTS-HD 5.1
Spanish: DTS-HD 5.1
Polish: DTS 5.1
Russian: DTS 5.1
Thai: DTS 5.1
English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Cantonese, Danish, Dutch, Korean, Norwegian, Romanian, Swedish, Turkish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.5 | |
Extras | 1.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
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.
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.
About eight and a half minutes of fairly useless deleted scenes are included, although they are all in high def.
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.
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