Christian Bale Saves Predictable Movie

Rating: 7/10 (25 February 2011)

Boxing movies are predictable. Drug addiction movies are predictable. Inspiring true stories are predictable. My next sentence is very predictable: The Fighter is annoyingly predictable.
But it's an enjoyable movie. Storytelling clichés aside, The Fighter triumphs as a heartbreaking movie about family relationships. When it's focusing on the protagonist and his large dysfunctional family it provides some of the best dramatic scenes of any movie this year. The filmmakers must have known that because they thankfully keep the boxing almost in the background in order to tell a very human story.
Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) is a boxing fighter with a low reputation. Coached by his crack head brother, Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), a former fighter and a local legend in their hometown of Lowell for once having knocked out Sugar Ray Leonard, he sees the years fly by as he fights in crappy matches that get him money but don't get him anywhere near his dream of having a shot at the title. Dicky and their mother (Melissa Leo), who acts as Micky's manageress, are, to put it mildly, incompetent in the way they manage his career.
Dicky has a serious drug addiction problem and can't see reality in front of him. This is made obvious when he lets an HBO crew make a documentary about him. Dicky claims they're filming his comeback, but in fact they're doing a piece on crack addicts. Dicky is too stoned most of the time to realise in Lowell people consider him a loser.
Micky's mother, Alice, worships Dicky. Dicky is always the centre of attentions. As the movie develops Micky deals with his self-esteem problem and finally finds the courage to break away from his mother's good-intentioned control and to move from under Dicky's shadow.
The Fighter entertained me but I never had the impression I was watching a great movie. A good ensemble of actors helps hide the fact that the direction is uninspired and the writing and storytelling clichéd. In fact some clichés just got on my nerves. I see them so often in boxing movies that I feel they should just put a moratorium on this genre until a super-screenwriter comes up with a new model to tell this type of stories.
Cliché number one: the inspiring speech at the end. We all know how the final fight plays out, right? We visualised it in our minds two hours in advance. We've seen the Rocky movies, Cinderella Man, Million Dollar Baby, even movies with Jean-Claude Van Damme. The protagonist is getting devastated by the opponent, he's giving up, but then he remembers something inspiring someone tells him, and bam, some massive surge of energy springs from within the deepest corner of his soul and it turns the tide of the fight in two seconds. It's a Knockout. We have a winner! Boring.
Cliché number two: the final opponent is always a jerk. Now Micky is the protagonist, we're supposed to like him, of course. But we've been liking him for almost two hours now. Must we really demonise his opponent, some guy called Shea Neary? Micky is a nice, polite dude. What about Neary? He's rude, he doesn't greet Micky in the ring. OK. Look, we already like Micky by now. We've already laughed and cried with him. We really want to see him become world champion. He could deliberately run over a dog and we'd still want him to win at this point. Turning the movie into a simple good vs. bad fight is futile. In real life Neary was probably just like Micky, he just wanted to fight box and win the title. Now is it too much to ask the filmmakers to respect my intelligence and not assault me with these third-rate ploys to win my sympathy? But as I said, when the movie isn't about boxing it's very good. Christian Bale steals the show with his portrayal of Dicky. Famous for his physical transformations and superb accents, Bale just disappears into his characters. He's one of the rare actors who doesn't need make-up. His performance is full of vitality and little ticks – he's so good he can capture the viewer's attention just with the fidgeting of his hands or the twitching of his eyes. Loud and electric, Bale plays the most interesting character in the movie. As warm as Micky's triumph may be, what I really loved was to watch Dicky fighting his addiction.
His addiction results in the best sequence in the movie. Dicky has been arrested. He's in prison. The crack documentary is showing on TV. He watches it with a crowd of inmates. Alice watches it with Dicky and Micky's sisters. Micky watches alone at home. Dicky sees the people of Lowell calling him an embarrassment and accusing him of giving the town a bad name. It's devastating, moving and cruel at the same time to see each family member, glued to the TV screen, reacting in their different way to it.
Micky's arc isn't nearly as interest or poignant but Wahlberg does a fine job. Yes, he's the weakest link the movie but his unpretentious, down-to-earth acting works in his favour when portraying such a simple and likable guy like Micky. More disappointing were Melissa Leo and Amy Adams, whom I expected at any moment to reveal the reasons why they earned Oscar nominations for this. Their greatness, however, if they had any, eluded me.
Even with its seven Oscar nominations, I doubt in a few years anyone remembers The Fighter except Christian Bale fans. 2010 will definitely be remembered as the year of the overrated movies.