The Fighter Review: Pulling the Punches that Count

David O. Russell's The Fighter is a solid film but it treads over ever-so-familiar territory.

"Irish" Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) is a boxer from Lowell, Massachusetts that is struggling to make a name for himself. His management team consists of his brother, Dicky Ecklund (Christian Bale), and his mother, Alice Ward (Melissa Leo). Dicky used to be a fighter himself: his claim to fame is that he knocked Sugar Ray Leonard down in a fight many years ago. However, Dicky has fallen from grace due to a crack cocaine addiction.

Micky meets Charlene (Amy Adams) while she is tending bar one night and begins to date her. When Dicky's drug problems land him in jail, Charlene urges Micky to find a different management team. After much coaxing, he does and things begin to go his way. But Micky can't escape his family ties.

There are quite a few problems with this film. Beginning with the title. Who exactly is the fighter? Is it Mark Wahlberg's Micky Ward or Christian Bale's Dicky Ecklund? Because Micky doesn't fight anything in this movie, with the exception of his opponents in the ring. Everywhere else he gets railroaded. He lets his mother and Dicky rule his life. They pick his opponents and decide when he fights, even if he ends up taking a beating for fighting out of his weight class. He has no backbone. That is until Amy Adams enters the film as Charlene and serves her solitary function: to fight Micky's familial battles for him and be his backbone. At the moment of confrontation when Micky is supposed to inform his mother that he is switching management, he doesn't. It is Charlene that speaks up and says what needs to be said.

Dicky Ecklund on the other hand is fighting everything. He's fighting his crack addiction. He's fighting against the law. He's even fighting against the reality of the present, thinking he is going to make a comeback as a boxer in his forties. Christian Bale is electric in this role. Many times has Christian Bale played the very serious, gloomy character, yet in this role, the role of man struggling with addiction and the loss of grace, he is the complete opposite. Dicky is not a good man, yet it is impossible not to like him. He is engaging and charming in every scene, even at his worst he is completely sympathetic. It really is a shame that he is an ancillary character to this story because his journey is far more interesting than anyone else's in the film.

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