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88Fighting has real grit and excellent acting. In other words, there is gold in that dirt.
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83Fighting doesn’t break new ground so much as animate B-movie types, but New York movies this gritty and flavorful don't come along very often.
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75I like the way the personalities are allowed to upstage the plot in Fighting, a routine three-act fight story that creates uncommonly interesting characters.
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75Fighting arrives fully charged by the charisma of its star, Channing Tatum, who has landed the lead in the upcoming "G.I. Joe."
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75In a genre where too many films are all brawn and no brain, Fighting is a contender.
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75Fighting is a fun, frank and faithful homage to simple inner-city drama.
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It's not "Raging Bull" or "Fight Club," but Fighting is populated by believable losers and lovingly adorned with just the right faces and peeling wallpaper to absorb you in Montiel's world.
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70Not everything that happens in Fighting entirely makes sense -- it’s a fable, after all, and a fable doesn't necessarily have to -- but it breathes with a rough, exuberant realism that you rarely see in movies of its kind.
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70Yet, even if the movie is a fake as a fight picture, it's still a decent commercial entertainment.
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67Howard's snappy-smooth performance, unsurprisingly, is what elevates Fighting from its hoary genre predecessors.
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60In Channing Tatum, who also starred in "Saints," the film has a good-looking, magnetic hunk to draw a crowd. Terrence Howard lends the pedigree of great screen acting, and Zulay Henao adds charm and glamour.
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60As its defiantly bland title suggests, Fighting is a bare-bones effort that tries just hard enough to keep us watching. By making good use of its New York setting, Montiel does bring a certain indie grit to the generic story.
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50It's not as if Fighting is terrible. The acting is well done, as is the unique look at the underbelly of the Big Apple.
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50Fighting is a crude love letter to seventies' New York cinema but set in the present.
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The director plays a visual game of three card monte on us for this silly, weakly acted and yet sometimes entertaining variation on the “Big Fight” movie formula.
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50Every so often you catch glimpses of a better movie behind the simplistic structure and formulaic plot.
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50For all the utter phoniness of Fighting -- the cockeyed, faux-verite shooting, the lurches in storytelling, the lack of character development, a contrived crisis between Shawn and his would-be girlfriend Zulay and Tatum's dopey-charming thing--Fighting's not so bad.
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50Authentic locations and careful attention to detail help evoke several New York boroughs in all their gritty vitality, but the screenplay about a hunky street vendor turned underground fighter is sloppy and false.
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Murderously dull stretches of dialogue suck most of the fun out of this sloppy drama.
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The movie never works up a pulpy head of steam. It's like an exploitation movie that thinks it's an art movie, only there's no art to be found.
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Fighting isn't very good, but it will make you hope that someday, some great director will give Tatum's pecs the star vehicle they deserve.
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38Fighting seriously lacks punch.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 6 out of 15
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Mixed: 0 out of 15
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Negative: 9 out of 15
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