A NAIVE, good-looking young southerner moves to New York and is struggling to survive when a street-smart operator befriends him to exploit his physical talents. That basic scenario, which triggered such honest, powerfully emotional drama in Midnight Cowboy, is reworked, simplistically and quite cynically, in Fighting.
The new kid in town is Shawn (Channing Tatum), who sleeps on a park bench when he can't afford a cheap hotel. Shawn is peddling counterfeit Harry Potterbooks on the streets of Manhattan when he gets into a brawl. His self-defence skills catch the eye of Harvey (Terrence Howard), a self- described "two-bit hustler" who lures Shawn with the promise of easy money into the underworld of bare-knuckle combat.
Shawn seems mild-mannered and sensitive, and he falls head over heels for a single mother (Zulay Henao) who works at a bar, but when it comes to fighting, he is violent and single-minded in his survival instincts. The predictable plotline takes its most implausible turn when Shawn happens to be pitted against a former high school wrestling team adversary (Brian White) from back home in Alabama.
This formulaic film is crucially lacking the freshness and insight that director Dito Montiel brought to his autobiographical A Guide to Recognising Your Saints(2006), a prize-winner at Sundance. That movie also featured Tatum, a rising actor who demonstrated his athletic prowess in the Step Up dance movies and dramatic range as a soldier returned traumatised from Iraq in Stop-Loss.
Playing Shawn’s wily mentor, Howard develops a stock character into a quirkily sleazy creation, but that’s almost beside the point in a movie that pretends to comdemn the illegal fisticuffs at its core, but clearly revels in choreographing and filming them in all their bone- crunching brutality.
Directed by Dito Montiel. Starring Channing Tatum, Terrence Howard, Zulay Henao, Luis Guzmán, Brian White 15A cert, gen release, 105 min **
