The Fighter
It has been a while since a boxing movie, that classic movie genre, has come to the big screen- perhaps the last one was Sylvester Stallone's pathetic attempt to revive the Rocky Balboa franchise in 2006 (Clint Eastwood's "Million Dollar Baby" opened in 2005). There is now a new addition to the genre that is sure to rank up there with the best. I'm speaking of "The Fighter".
The ingredients for a perfect boxing movie are all here: family, poverty, cultural pride (this time Irish), very bad guys, and a lot of smacking and slapping- maybe a bit too much. The lead actors include the chameleonic Christian Bale and Mark Wahlberg. Surely Bale's physical transformation is just as impressive as in "The Machinist", more so than leading man Mark "Marky Mark" Wahlberg, who has no problem taking his shirt off in the movies (though there is good reason for this in the plot of "The Fighter"). In any case, the plot has more weight than the chiseled images seen in teh ring. Without a doubt this is one of the movies of the year.
