'Fighting'

McClatchy Newspapers (MCT) - Nothing seems real in "Fighting," Dito Montiel's sports melodrama set in a seamy New York City underworld of bare-knuckled boxing matches. That's exactly the point.

Channeling both the old-fashioned "Will-the-boxer-throw-the-fight?" stories of the 1940s and '50s, most famously Robert Rossen's "Body and Soul" (1947), and the stylized vision of New York served up in Walter Hill's "The Warriors" (1979), Montiel has given us an unusually expressive sports movie; a piece of pulp fiction that is punch drunk on Hollywood history.

If you saw Montiel's previous effort, the madly uneven and often just plain maddening "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints," based on his memoir of growing up in the Bronx in the 1980s, "Fighting" shouldn't come as a complete surprise. As he proved the first time around, the director has a real gift for kinesis. Moving his camera with ragged urgency, he introduces us to the major players and stages an unusually balletic street fight, all in the first five minutes of this new picture.

But if "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints" came across as shrill and lurching _ the work of an overeager novice _ "Fighting" displays restraint and attentiveness to character; indeed, the greatest surprise here is how little actual fighting (and even less blood) we see.

The story centers on Shawn MacArthur (Channing Tatum), a hulking young man who scrapes by selling cheap books and umbrellas on the street, and Harvey Boarden (Terrence Howard), a self-described "two-bit hustler" who notices that Shawn has a natural gift for fighting. Their meeting is contrived, in a splendidly old-Hollywood kind of way _ of all the street corners in New York, Shawn just happens to be hawking his wares on the same corner where Harvey hustles. The melodrama that unfolds is relatively predictable: Harvey becomes Shawn's agent and gets him a number of lucrative fights, but ultimately asks him to throw an important match so he can make a financial killing with a pair of shady bookies.

Yet at every turn, "Fighting" is alive and unexpected.

Consider Howard's sometimes grating, ultimately fascinating performance, in which he adopts a nasally, stacatto whine. Much like Montiel, he puts Hollywood history into a blender - the character is a cross between Willy Loman, Broadway Danny Rose and Rain Man - and serves up something completely one-of-a-kind. Even more impressive are the four boxing sequences, almost otherworldly visions that take us to an apartment in Brighton Beach, a bodega in the Bronx, a mysterious brothel run by a group of Asian businessmen, and finally the rooftop of an unfinished penthouse in Manhattan.

Until its dopey cop-out ending, "Fighting" has all the makings of a classic. The fights themselves have a tense, straight-ahead fury (even if Montiel occasionally edits them to the point of incomprehensibility). The love story that flowers between Shawn and Zulay (Zulay Henao), a beautiful single mother struggling to pay the rent, is heartfelt and sweet. Tatum proves the movie star magnetism he's displayed in "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints" and "Step Up" was no fluke; his mixture of intense physicality and laconic tenderness brings to mind a young Steve McQueen.

If those final moments strike a discordant, falsely upbeat note _ and if the entire movie seems a little too desperate to secure a PG-13 rating _ you're willing to forgive Montiel his missteps. A movie with this much vibrancy cannot and should not be denied.

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FIGHTING

4 stars (out of 5)

Starring: Channing Tatum, Terrence Howard

Directed by: Dito Montiel

PG-13 (intense violence, sexual content, strong language); 105 min.

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© 2009, Fort Worth Star-Telegram.