Critic Gary Arnold of "The Washington Post" wrote in his review: ""Fighting Back" is a lurid glorification of urban vigilantism remotely inspired by the career of Anthony Imperiale, the charismatic community leader of riled and fearful Italian-American residents in Newark in the late '60s. Imperiale himself is recalled in newsreel clips in the course of the movie, which opens for no justifiable reason with a medley of traumatic documentary footage, from the assassination of President Kennedy through the assassination attempts on President Reagan and Pope John Paul II... All of them are impressively overqualified for the minimal, motley quality of illusion that "Fighting Back" is content to confuse with effective contemporary melodrama."