Fighting

Fighting purports to offer an insider’s view of an illicit underground subculture that comes alive just as the city’s ordinary, decent denizens go to bed. Here, it’s the world of bare-knuckles brawling, whose competitors fight simply because they enjoy it or because there’s money to be made, not out of emasculated rage against an overly commodified society, like the angry young men of Fight Club. Fighting director Dito Montiel, who won the Sundance directing prize for his erratic but absorbing 2006 debut feature A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, seems incapable of making an ordinary bad movie — he’s too much of a willful eccentric, with a casual disregard for things like backstory, character development and narrative tension, and with a high indulgence for eccentric performers. So Fighting plays like an exploitation movie that thinks it’s an art movie, with lackluster fight scenes, a grafted-on romance and no art anywhere to be found.