Every so often, there’s a movie like Fighting: a gritty,
urban multicultural potboiler that’s WAY BETTER than it has any right
to be. Films like the original The Fast and the Furious or
Dark Blue are B movies, to be sure, but they crackle with so
much earnest talent that they practically feel like something new.
Shawn (Channing Tatum, drawling and brooding) sells counterfeit
Harry Potter books on the New York City streets for pocket change until
he runs into Harvey (Terrence Howard, who charms by endlessly running
his mouth), a hustler who decides that Shawn could clean up on the
underground fight circuit. Of course there’s a girl (Zulay Henao, a
gorgeous and weary single mom), and of course Shawn accidentally runs
into a nemesis from his childhood (Brian J. White, oozing smarmy
confidence) whom he will eventually encounter in a climactic battle.
It’s a fight movie, a well-worn formula.
But the fighting in Fighting is fast and painful (there are
no slo-mo shots or superhuman abilities here; it’s just meat hitting
meat for a $10,000 prize). The New York these characters live in is
appropriately hellish (Fighting is a Dante’s
Inferno–style tour of the increasingly opulent, and
morally corrupt, circles of New York, from Brooklyn to the Bronx to
Koreatown to Manhattan), and the characters feel genuine. Despite a
third-act dramatic twist that doesn’t exactly work, the great
performances in Fighting—especially Howard and
Tatum—give the material a raw urgency that sparkles, creating a
sexy, likable underdog of a film about sexy, likable underdogs. 
Are you writing reviews for the Seattle Times now?
My first impression from the ads was “capitalist rip-off of Fight Club, where all the interesting bits are excised into and what remains is polished into a commercial turd.”
I actually thought of it as an update of the 1975 Walter Hill/Charles Bronson movie Hard Times.
I’ll confess that this piqued my interest. It has two of my favorite cinematic ingredients–Terrence Howard and hand-to-hand combat.
I would fuck Channing Tatum.