Fist Fight never lands a good punch

Ice Cube and Charlie Day in Fist Fight. Image courtesy Warner Bros.

I really don't understand what the filmmakers behind Fist Fight were going for with this movie. I mean, it is supposed to be a comedy and casts ringers like Charlie Day, Tracy Morgan, Jillian Bell and Kumail Nanjiani, along with complementary pieces Dean Norris and Christina Hendricks. But beyond the flailing attempts at comedy, the film lacks a clear message, relatable characters or anything worthy near a logical point. It seems like the movie might have something to say about education, but the folks behind the camera lack the talent and nuance to vocalize it thoroughly.

Fist Fight veers in several directions, bouncing from a story about a stressed out teacher (Charlie Day) trying to escape the titular match/assumed beating from a fellow educator played by Ice Cube to a movie about the sad state of public education to a last day of school flick that comes across as a discount Dazed and Confused knockoff. It tries to be all of these things and, fittingly enough, fails at all of them on some capacity, delivering a movie with a lackadaisical plot with an asinine conclusion. Even its criticisms of the education system are dinged by the savage and cruel actions of the protagonists (Day, Ice Cube and the rest of the staff), heavy hints at sexual abuse toward the students, and the hyper-reality the film lives in. The horrid actions of the students, whose shenanigans cover giving meth to a horse, lassoing teachers to said horse, and masturbating audibly in a public restroom, is either a typical lazy high school film or a parody of lazy high school film. The latter would be a more interesting concept if the film didn't try to ground itself with a story about teachers getting fired wantonly, using the students' outre actions as a sign for theoretically legitimate challenges and issues educators face. In other words, Fist Fight creates an exaggerated reality and uses that exaggerated reality as a root cause for real problems.

Perhaps a narrowly focused narrative – maybe one focused on, say, Day's slow acceptance of his doom at the fists of Ice Cube – would have resulted in better jokes from the writers.The film has many ideas for jokes, like the horse, the onanism and the bizarre behavior from the teachers, along with a hypothesis that swearing is funny in and of itself. Little of it works though because the filmmakers never take the time to develop any of the jokes. They just spit out a line or throw out an image with little context aside from the idea that what they have might be perceived as funny, but without taking the time to find a way to make it funny (let alone inventive or original). It's all wicked lazy and reflective of a general absence of curiosity over the craft they're attempting to master. Comedy is hard, but you have to at least put the effort in to make it work.

That extends to Fist Fight's cast as well, one that on paper is again more than qualified to at least bump this material up to tolerable. Nobody aside from Bell (who offers a peculiarly fascinating performance) appears to care that much about the material or making the junk in front of them work. Day, a person who is often very funny in a supporting role, is miscast as the film's lead, while the idea of Ice Cube being an intimidating on-screen presence went by the wayside after the release of Are We There Yet? That Norris, Nanjiani, Morgan and Hendricks are given so little to do that looking bored on screen is a viable option is a waste of their and the viewers' time.

What makes Fist Fight so frustratingly is it isn't a hopeless film. The pieces exist to build something adequate and at the least entertaining, something of value for people who schlep through a winter's worth of snow for a few laughs and maybe some pointed commentary. Yet the filmmakers seem unsure of how to use what they have to deliver something competent, or at least lack the motivation to do anything with it besides unleash 90 insipid minutes of cinema into the February malaise.

Review: One out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 96 minutes

Genre: Comedy

Ask Away

Target audience: People who like Charlie Day or consider Ice Cube to be an engaging comedic presence.

Take the whole family?: This film traffics in curses and obscene imagery, so perhaps keeping kids at home is for the best.

Theater or Netflix?: Neither is a good option.

What else is wrong about this film?: One of the main plot points is the school districts waiting for the end of the last day of school to inform the teachers if they'll be retained or not. Most states, including the one the film is set in, require districts to extend contracts for renewal well before the end of the school year (due in part to the need to get the budget prepared by the end of the fiscal year in June). In other words, even the process the film uses to fire teachers is malarkey.

Watch this instead?: There are many, many better comedies to watch than this, but I'm going to go outside the box a bit and recommend 24 Hours to Live from Hey Arnold! This episode also has a character waiting for a fist fight from a stronger opponent, albeit with a more interesting plot and a nifty resolution to the issue.