Hardly anything ground breaking or original but well made and solid enough to cover this up

Rating: 7/10 (30 June 2011)

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning
In the seventies, Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale) was riding high as a boxing sensation, but two decades later, he's succumbed to a crippling crack addiction and gets by committing petty crimes to fund his habit. All the attention's now turned to his younger brother Micky (Mark Whalberg), the new 'great white hope.' Micky has a natural talent and ability, which could take him very far, if all the things and people around him don't conspire to stop him reaching his goals.
The boxer is a familiar figure to feature in stories of the 'underdog' who triumpths against all odds. The appeal of these movies is their relatability, since there are far more lost souls not reaching their full potential out there in this world than there are real success stories, and this character, with little else to get by on other than their raw toughness, resilience and determination to be 'the best', seems to embody this description really well. Often coming from poor, deprived backgrounds, with trashy friends and family toughened by the same rough social conditions as them who, while some might mean well, all the same conspire in some way without even realizing it, to hold them down and keep them there with them, this figure often faces tough adversity in their journey to rise themselves out from the gutter and will doubtless run into moments of self doubt and enraged frustration along the way. But, in a rough and cynical world, in the end their hard work pays off and one moment of brief, fleeting but over whelming luck runs their way and they (and the audience) feel that bit better. Basically, The Fighter follows this formula to a tee, but while it's most obviously a Rocky clone, it has elements of that film but also of that other most famous of the boxing movies, Robert De Niro's Raging Bull, with it being partly told in flashback with the two main characters talking into a camera at the beginning and end, re-living past glories and prepping each other up.
While it's ultimately a very predictable story, David O' Russell's film is never sentimental or corny, or without it's little flairs that make it stand out on it's own, most notably Bale's wild, quirky older brother character, whose pathetic addiction and increasingly pitiful existence never manages to erode his natural charisma and easy charm with people. Whalberg doesn't particularly stretch himself in the lead role, but his natural monosyllabic drone and drawl fit him to the role perfectly and mean he can pull it off with ease. Mention should also go to Amy Adams, as feisty, upfront love interest Charlene, another product of the rough, trashy environment all of the characters are caught up in. This type of film is the sort the Academy and critics always lap up, and while it's not in any way ground breaking or original enough to be anything more than okay, it's well made and solid enough to be nowhere near average. ***