"Every dream deserves a fighting chance"

Rating: 7/10 (16 April 2012)

A look at the early years of boxer "Irish" Micky Ward and his brother who helped train him before going pro in the mid 1980s.
The Fighter comes with all the right tools to become a great boxing movie... It had a cast: Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale; two amazing actors who really dig into the movie rather than play around with it. It had a plot: a movie based on true events, while also maintaining focus on the drama outside of the ring. So I basically had high expectations, as all of these can structure a movie into something worth watching, or something worth feeling...
The Fighter is just average. Now I say that knowing that people won't agree, but sadly the Fighter as been done too many times before in these kind of films. It has great fighting scenes (spectacular, actually) and DOES focus on more than the fighting, but it got carried away trying to be bigger and badder than it needed to be. The plot outside the ring was honestly clichéd, and never held the emotional punch it intended to do. But the one thing that saved this film from being the 6 is the acting. Mark Wahlberg was fantastic as a character we can actually hold interest in. They didn't cliché him as much they did Christian Bale, but although he was a bit clichéd, he did a fantastic job! He antics resembled a real junkie and his acting was a tremendous step outside the Batman trilogy. He held the power to hold a realistic performance but withheld the power to step away from these fighting movie clichés. Other than that, the acting was the thing steaming from this film. And the plot.. it's too contrived. I've seen the boxing film before, many times actually, but where?
Should you see it? .. Although the movie IS clichéd, and it never strays away from becoming what other films have become, the movie has so many redeeming qualities I can't give it a BAD score. It was well-acted, the fight scenes were realistic, and the cast was well-resembled. I recommend it for the noobs for the genre, but any thing outside of that, it's just another typical fighting film. 7/10.