The most common form of this divide in film is the idea of the movie in which the pitch is the joke. Casa De Mi Padre is a great example of this. It is a Will Ferrell movie all in Spanish and it's played completely straight. The joke is that it's unflinching in how seriously it's being done without ever winking at the camera. While not quite at that level, Fist Fight is close to being a "pitch" movie.
The idea that inspired Fist Fight is "A high school movie about a kid who gets challenged to a fight by a bully...except they're both teachers". That's a funny enough twist on the formula. That alone is not enough to sustain a movie though. The sad-sack protagonist is pushover nice guy, Andy (Charlie Day). The bully, is the intimidating Mr. Strickland (Ice Cube). After Andy lets the school principal know about a particularly violent outburst by Strickland in his class, Strickland challenges Andy to a fight at the end of school for snitching. Andy spends the rest of the day getting advice from other faculty members, like the school's highly inappropriate guidance counselor (Jillian Bell) and the checked-out gym teacher (Tracy Morgan), trying to get out of the fight through legal and illegal means, attempting to keep his job amidst budget cuts, and keeping a promise to show up for his daughter's talent show. It's like Ferris Beuller's Day Off in the way that it fits more events into a single day than most people could in a week or month.
I saw this for the cast. Charlie Day can lead a movie like this rather easily. While he's known for playing crazier roles, he can switch to being an "everyman" without losing what's funny about him. Ice Cube's career for the last decade or more has been about reminding people that he's a tough guy, so this role is fitting with Jump Street, Ride Along, etc. Jillian Bell does what she normally does well: takes jokes too far in a funny way. Tracy Morgan, Dean Norris, and Kumail Nanjiani, playing different levels of faculty at the school, get a few laughs out of funny line readings. Christina Hendricks has a dud of a role as a French teacher with a sadistic streak. I think it was intended to play off a contrast of what you expect her to be like. The role isn't built up enough though and she just doesn't pull off 'unhinged' well.
This movie was mostly a dud. The humor was a touch too sophomoric and tactless (such as the students mowing a giant penis on the school's football field). The school is a cartoon, which is fine if they weren't trying to make serious points about school funding at the same time. The movie gives several potential outs for the fight to not happen, and the reasons it come up with to move forward with the fight anyway are the kind of reasons that exist only because the movie needs them too (the classic "plot driven decisions" vs. "character driven decisions"). Worst of all, the fight promised at the end was a bummer. Like the rest of the movie, it couldn't decide what the scale of it should be: genuine fist fight or Peter Griffin versus the chicken.
Fist Fight is ok. No one will be blown away by it unless this is the first high school comedy he/she has ever seen. It has a lot of performers doing what they do well. A few of the jokes land well even despite some forced staging (For example, children swearing will just always be funny to me). This makes a strong case for Charlie Day leading more movies in the future. I want to find more to be excited about by it, but I can't.
Verdict (?): Weakly Don't Recommend
No comments:
Post a Comment