Some of the more fascinating clashes in this boxing movie unfold outside of the ring, in what is a workmanlike and wholly functional relationship/sporting drama.

Rating: 7/10 (8 December 2011)

I think when the titular lead in the Coen brothers' 1991 film Barton Fink was repeatedly asked to pen a "wrestling movie", this is the sort of film that rich; mansion owning; pool-side dwelling studio executive was asking him to write. The Fighter has just about everything along those lines, the sort of film that builds to a 'big fight'; follows a plucky underdog who comes good; that has a delicate romance sewn up in amidst proceedings and enjoys its scenes in which volatile friends and family members bicker and clash with our lead over his decisions as he finally gets the chance to get along by himself in life. Unlike our old friend Fink, the makers of The Fighter are not stifled by the material, nor do they struggle with inserting real drive into proceedings. In fact, they tear into all of the frameworks; genre demands and character arcs with such aplomb, that it's difficult not to offer a meek smile and a brief internal cheer when a certain latter-part of the film fight has just ended and the result is what it is, despite knowing that the sorts of people we're rooting on are what they are on account of spending the last hour and a half with them.
The lead is Mark Wahlberg's Mickey Ward, the little brother to a rather renowned Irish-American boxer named Dicky, played by Christian Bale, operating out of the American city of Lowell, in Massachusetts. A part time road sweep who boxes a little himself, Mickey lives in the shadow of his elder brother whose record is admirable and whose real claim to fame was that he knocked down a certain "Sugar" Ray Leonard in a particular fight before going on to lose – a sort of 'Henry Cooper knocking down Cassius Clay' moment wherein people think of the actual result second to a specific moment in the contest. Dicky and Mickey occupy the frame together when we first see them, an odd moment in which a real-life 1990s made for TV documentary about drug addiction is being brought to life, fictitiously, with Bale and Wahlberg filling in for their counterparts. Dicky is the talkative one, a man who usually need only saunter down a street in the general area to be recognised and congratulated by the locals; Mickey cannot get a word in, but is talked up as the "next big thing" in boxing.
The fight against Leonard is a big deal to these people; if there is anything at all they can remember in-between their crack habits and low-level criminal activity, then it is how to speak the English language; what it is their names are and that moment in 1976 when Dicky took a swing in front of a packed Boston crowd only to floor the rather more famous "Sugar" Ray. When the pair of them bump into one another at a boxing match some time later, we observe the respective entourages either men possess; Dicky speaks as if Leonard were on a similar wavelength to that of him anyway, as if Leonard has been brooding and revelling in such a moment from however many number of years ago similarly to how Dicky has been all this time. It isn't long before we're zeroing in on Mickey, though; at a bar late at night wherein leering and laughing and joking in that loud and obnoxious manner that's often apparent in dives such as the one depicted, we observe Mickey's physical distancing from the crowds and his more gentlemanly approach to the bar girl, Amy Adams' Charlene, when all that preceded it was filth.
Around this distinction unfolds a part of Mickey's own boxing career; his relationship with Charlene and the class war with his half a dozen sisters-plus-volatile mother which is instigated as a result of this. First and foremost, the film is about someone veering away from foundations which only appear sturdy and into realms that are new and somewhat frightening but are independent and will be successful with hard graft. The scenes Mickey spends with Charlene are fun and feel different, her practising of an old hobby-come-sport of her own in high jumping whilst outside in a leisurely manner in stark contrast to the flesh and blood in Dicky attempting to scam bystanders into providing him with cash to feed his own drug habit. In moving away from the parental ties Mickey has, and away from the drug-problem riddled brother, we sense the author's message in depicting Mickey's success story away from these things.
The film is executed in an engaging fashion, in spite of its relatively formulaic foundations; the director, a certain David O. Russell, keeps everything moving in the brisk manner he did with his Kelly's Heroes simulacrum in 1999's Three Kings, whilst providing us with a film so apt in journeyman-like qualities that the only real criticisms are limited to it being culpable to accusations of formula. Away from the training montages, of which are a beat from the overture ringing out during Rocky II's training montage away from self-parody, and away from the frantic searches for the likes of new sponsors and trainers when Dicky falls foul of the law, the film possesses some fantastic acting performances depicting pent up people in a hostile place continually expressing themselves, and is an involving drama which is easy to sneer at but difficult not to get wrapped up in.