Movie Review: The Fighter

LITTLE ROCK — There are some really outstanding performances in The Fighter, David O. Russell’s fact-based story of the unlikely rise of a light-welterweight boxer from working-class Lowell, Mass. - Mark Wahlberg as “Irish” Micky Ward, and Amy Adams as Ward’s girlfriend (and future wife), Charlene Fleming.

Now if you’re the sort of person who follows Oscar babble, you might be surprised by that statement, because all the handicappers are touting Christian Bale - who plays Dicky Eklund, a former fighter who trained his half brother Micky to the championship after battling a crack addiction - and Melissa Leo, who plays Micky and Dicky’s manager-mother, as probable nominees. And Bale and Leo do turn in showy, borderline-cruel performances as outsized characters. (Bale’s at least seems accurate, based on the brief, end credits that show footage of his model - some people are walking caricatures.)

But while I believed in Wahlberg and Adams, the rest of the film took on a kind of made-for-TV feeling, as the familiar, reassuring rhythms of reversal and redemption beat faithfully along to a feel-good finish.

I know it’s a “true story.” I know Wahlberg trained for years to get in shape to play this part and that it’s probably a very important, personal movie for him (it doesn’t feel like Russell’s film, and probably isn’t really; there were several directors attached before Wahlberg brought in his old buddy - who hadn’t made a movie since 2004’s I Heart Huckabees). But it’s really just the same old boxing movie, dressed out with a frightening chorus of fried-hair harpies (the seven young ladies who play Micky and Dicky’s sisters) and Bale and Leo’s manic mugging.

It works, to a degree, as a comedy - individual scenes are very funny - but there’s too much here that feels pat, and the boxing scenes don’t pop like they should.

Still, Wahlberg and Adams find something gritty and credible in their beat-down, blue-collar characters, and their moments on screen together have a deep, resounding humanity. It’s like they’re the last pair of humans on earth, surrounded by rampaging, scenery-crushing aliens.