I know that some people’s dream would be to punch actor Charlie Day in the face, however because the Make A Wish Foundation don’t have that as an option, the next best thing might be to get Ice Cube to do it for you in the new movie about teachers with poor inter-relationship skills, Fist Fight.
Set on the last day of the school year in a run-down middle-American high school where resources are as low as the morale, the ethics of some of the teachers and counsellors is questionable to say the very least, students seem to look about twenty-six for some reason and staff are being fired left, right and centre; we find Andy Campbell, played by Always Sunny’s Charlie Day put in a position where he has to rat on man with a permanent scowl on his face Ice Cube which ultimately leads to a fight after school which has the whole community abuzz. Of course in between all of this, Andy needs to reapply for his job, make it to his daughter’s dance recital, make it home to his pregnant wife who’s ready to drop any moment now and somehow manage to get out of the inevitable ass-whooping that’s a-coming.
At ninety-one minutes in length, the film is mercifully short when compared to the normal run times of comedies nowadays but still manages to pack in a lot into its’ relatively thin premise and this is mostly due to the supporting cast. Yes you have Charlie Day playing a very Charlie Day kind of character and Ice Cube is scary as f*ck which is par the course for all of his roles; you have Jillian Bell of Workaholics and 22 Jump Street fame playing, essentially the same character she plays in both those series, and you have a Tracy Morgan who appears to have just wandered onto set and has been allowed to just do Tracy Morgan-things. This cast ad-libs and provides the usual random crudeness which is certainly funny if not a little repetitive of, well, every friggin’ American comedy for the last decade and a half. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of all the cast, but they all seem to be in cruise-control mode when it comes to the characters they play - it would just be good to see these actors mix it up a little with their characters.
The fight itself pulls a lot of inspiration from other famous fight scenes such as Clint Eastwood’s Any Which Way But Loose and the forever awesome fight between the late, great Roddy Piper and Keith David in They Live however the fight itself easily succumbs to cliche just like every other aspect of the film. As mentioned before, without spoiling how any moment ends, you have a job interview, a dance recital, an impending birth along with the promised fist fight and without seeing any of the film, you already know how each scene is going to end. The same can be said for many of the visual gags in the film, you just know that two boys pushing around lawnmowers on a football field during end of year prank day is going to lead to only one thing.
Once again, the cast are good and I am a big fan of Charlie Day, I think he’s got that manic energy that makes him a modern day Bobcat Goldthwait however all his time on Always Sunny In Philadelphia has probably ruined people’s expectations for his film work. When you have a show like Always Sunny, where the characters can be really dark and f*cked up and pretty much anything goes, the characters on the big screen just feel like a step back from that because it all feels too safe.
Now I’m not wanting to labor on the actors in character cruise-control complaint too much, but I really feel that that is what keeps this film from being truly memorable, each actor plays the same character they always play and their comedy and choices stay very in-line with their U.S.P. - a very risk averse approach. Just for example, the film features Christina Hendricks and is completely under-utilised as a French teacher who is more than a little disturbed, however you can remove her small scenes from the film and it would have no impact on the story. If she had instead played the role of Jillian Bell’s freaky meth-smoking guidance counsellor who’s more interested in getting some “teenus” than actually helping any of the kids, then this might have made for some more memorable performances.
Overall, the film has it’s charms. The cast carry the light-weight premise as far as they can without really straying too far from their respective lanes whilst the majority of your enjoyment does rest on your own tolerance of Charlie Day. As I said, I like him a lot and the film certainly gave me a lot of laughs, even if many of those laughs felt very familiar and I could see them coming from a mile away. As a teacher myself, I will say I did like that the film did try to tackle the world of teaching today, but I still feel that it didn’t quite hit the mark. If you just need to switch off and have a harmless laugh, then Fist Fight is the movie for you this week in the cinemas.
Fist Fight gets Two and a Half out of Five Stars (or Two and a Half out of Five meth-smoking guidance counsellors giving really bad advice.
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