Completing This Year's Trifecta of Massachusetts Inspired Triumphs

Rating: 8/10 (19 December 2010)

Who cares about Secretariat (too many legs) or Burlesque (ditto) when you can have three outstanding and inspired films from Massachusetts in one year: The Town, Conviction and The Fighter. What's going on up there? Whatever it is, it is good. The Fighter is about relationship, about never giving up, about real triumph, and it would have been horrifying if it had been heavy-handed, but it isn't, and so, it works.
Please don't go if you mind the f-word, as it is used throughout as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and in some respects excessively so, as if a bit of lazy writing crept in. (Hey! We know how to make the lower middle class seem real! We'll have them f*-everything.!) The sisters were genius, John Waters level genius. (Divine would seek resurrection just for a shot at a chance to appear.) One editing/shooting oddity. It appears Charlene has tattoos in the beginning of the film, but not later. What gives with that? Christian Baler is brilliant. Mark Wahlberg is my favorite of all favorites, and I am waiting for the day that he will star in a movie drawn from a book by Robert Parker with a screenplay by Dennis Lehane. Then I will be able to say I have lived a good life. Not that I have given the matter any thought.
This movie is a keeper.