Calum Gilchrist
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Review: The Fighter
18th February
The reviews for The Fighter have been really good and a few of my friends have said that they really enjoyed it. Even with this positive feedback I was still a bit wary of the film. Rightly so, as I’m not really a fan of sports and I’m definitely not a fan of boxing. I will admit that I was surprised when I liked some of the fights but overall I wasn’t impressed with the beginning of the film.
Certain films start off very slowly and The Fighter is one of those. I say start but it was more like 30-40 minutes that weren’t really engaging. I felt myself urging the story to just get over with it. The story revolves around Mark Wahlberg who plays a boxer. Mark Wahlberg is trained by his older brother, played by Christian Bale, who is a drug addict and is a very unreliable trainer. The idea is that Mark Wahlberg is being dragged down by his family; his brother who doesn’t care and his mother who only cares about Christian Bale.
I picked this up within the first 10 minutes and it just felt like it was being dragged out for longer and longer. Eventually there is a change to the matters which helped the movie get along a bit. After Christian Bale was sent to prison the film started to pick up a bit of pace and I started to enjoy it a lot more. I’ll admit that it was still slow at parts and Mark Wahlberg’s character was very quiet, barely said a thing.
Some people seem to not like Christian Bale, where I quite like him. I’m glad that he didn’t use his Batman voice again, like he did in Public Enemies. I really like him just for the Prestige and American Psycho is quite high on my list of films to see. I’m not really sure why people don’t like him, maybe it’s not dissimilar from my thing against Shia La Beouf - although he is beginning to annoy me a little less. I won’t speculate on whether Christian Bale will or won’t get the Oscar for Best Supporting actor that he was nominated for as I don’t really know what I thought about his performance. I quite liked his performance even though his character bored me just a little bit.
As it’s a boxing film, you can probably guess that it has a big fight in the end of it. It’s really the only way that it can go. Most of the fights were okay, but the final fight was really great. For some reason I found myself cheering along. Whenever Mark Wahlberg landed a punch I could feel myself saying: “YES”. That never normally happens to me and is probably a credit to the film. The final fight was the best part of the movie. Was just great.
Seeing the film JUST for the final fight would be a waste but it really was the best part. Sitting through the rest of the film wasn’t too bad for the good payoff. There were parts that lacked any punch and other parts that were just enjoyable. It’s not a bad film, in any respect, but I’d like to say that it was not for me. Someone into the sport might like it a whole lot more than me but personally it wasn’t really to my tastes.
The Fighter: 3/5
