deadbull-95171 Review of A Fighting Man

A Fighting Man (I) (2014)

It Coulda Been a Contender but this one is down for the count.

[3/10 · 8 September 2023]

If this thing had stuck more closely to the story it shamelessly plagiarizes, Jack London's 'A Piece of Steak', about an over-the-hill fighter who's ability to take all kinds of punishment, and whose threadbare and broke with a desperate spouse, and who has already been advanced and spent the loser's end of the purse, matched against an opponent half his age, 'King' (the name comes from London's story), who ends up winning despite the old man's being game, things would have fared much better for the film and the viewer. Instead, this trumped up mess devotes its entire run time to this one pointlessly symbolic, idiotic fight, which is continually back-cut with flashes explaining how all the losers involved got to this current sorry state of affairs. Please read the elegant short story instead of seeing this. In this epic disaster, the two fighters are both bloated and shockingly inept. The eye of this bizarre tragedy, 'Sailor" ,is an affable klutz with a bad conscience and an oceanic masochism. He hovers in the ring with slack dead arms and almost never throws a punch. When he does, it's a leaden blubbery stump moving through Jello that come across as a reluctant nudge. In the final round he even tells his moronic young opponent to 'just do it', and finish him off, as his useless stumps hang by his sides. His young opponent is equally ludicrous, throwing wild haymakers that connect but with no power, despite the sound effects that suggest the broad side of a shovel sledging into huge slabs of dead meat. In reality if just one of these wrecking ball punches hit a passive ruin like 'sailor', the fight would end within eleven seconds of the first round, taking into account the ten seconds needed to make the KO official. But, dragged out as it is, any suspense about the outcome is dissipated in the endless and ominously heavy back stories of the long suffering ex'es and Gf's and buddies. All of that should have been dispensed with 'great dispatch' in the first minutes of the movie, and then opened into the big (and in this case utterly and comically, though unintentionally), slack fight. The simplest formula. It's too bad I guess, because we have James Caan and Mike Ironsides and Famke Janssen. But nothing can rescue this tottering punch drunk mess. When there's no dynamic, no drive, and no momentum, this is the result.