"make me wanna holler the way they do my life"

Rating: 10/10 (16 February 2011)

Right now, everybody knows what's the deal with The Fighter. Everybody knows about the performance of Christian Bale. Everybody knows that he is the one who steals the film. Hell, everybody knows that he will win the Oscar for best supporting actor in a couple of weeks. He is fantastic indeed, and I will just add that for me was really remarkable how Bale gains you when the runtime of the movie doesn't even marks 10 seconds. It's great, I was like "well everybody was right, Bale is doing something truly remarkable here". I just loved his performance. And that clip during the closing credits showing the real-life Dicky Ward (Bale's character. He is the older brother of the main character) sort of gives *even* more value to Bale's performance as you can see that he really got Dicky.
I saw this one a week ago, a week after I saw for the very first time The Basketball Diaries (1995). Two movies that might be nice companion pieces as they deal with the same subjects: sports, drug addiction and family. And Mark "Marky Mark" Wahlberg is in both. The Basketball Diaries goes as the one that presents the "downfall" kind of story and here we have a movie about the rise to success. Here the main character, Wahlberg's Micky Ward (yes, Bale steals the movie but not by much as Wahlberg is AMAZING too, making of Micky a truly great and hugely likable main character. Definitely one of the high-points of his acting career), grows in every way during the course of the picture. The problems come from the outside, well, from his very own family to be exact. There we have the "downfall" story with Dicky, once a local hero of boxing but now the subject of an HBO documentary about crack cocaine addiction. So there we have the drug addiction thing, the family issues. The Fighter is, as some other IMDb users have said, a crowd-pleasing picture. It's really well constructed, having characters like the ones of Melissa Leo and Amy Adams (the mother and girlfriend of Micky) that really help in order to create the kind of perfect crowd-pleasing picture: with characters you really care for and powerful moments full of emotion moments like when the little known song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, "Strip My Mind" (I was like "I know this song"! it was a really pleasant surprise to hear it here. Also, loved that the soundtrack features classic rock tunes like Led Zeppelin's "Good Times Bad Times" and the Rolling Stones' "Can't You Hear Me Knocking"!), appears (when is like the new beginning for our main character) are the ones that due to the great emotion presented really got me. I'm getting really corny but, thankfully, the movie never does that. Great stuff.