"Fighting" a able account of beggarly streets

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) – Nothing adorned about the title: "Fighting." The filmmakers absolutely apperceive what they're affairs in this glimpse into the apple of underground bare-knuckled fights captivated in clandestine spots all over New York. But the becloud comes from Dito Montiel, who showed he can put street life vividly on becloud in his asperous and raw 2006 Sundance debut, "A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints."

So while Rogue Pictures -- which releases the becloud Friday (April 24) -- is business hot action, Montiel is added absorbed in how hustlers, drifters, con artists and the alive poor anticipate and act.

In Channing Tatum, who additionally starred in "Saints," the becloud has a good-looking, alluring hunk to draw a crowd. Terrence Howard lends the full-blooded of abundant awning acting, Zulay Henao adds agreeableness and glamour, and a accomplished acknowledging casting validates the semi-documentary approach. The becloud should accomplish able-bodied in burghal areas with adolescence and adolescent adults. Suggesting the atrocity of the fights alone to a PG-13 akin of clear acuteness is a acute idea.

While the cine makes no abolitionist abandonment from the action movies of the 1930s and '40s, Montiel and co-writer Robert Munic use the artifice as a accomplishments to this abstraction in characters and relationships formed on the fly in mean streets, aback offices and hideaways of the rich.

Channing is a Southern lad new to the city. He shows abundant activity in a street brawl for Howard's atomic aerial to booty him beneath his wing. Overnight, the kid is adapted into the bare-knuckle circuit's latest chump.

And he is a chump, for no one cares whether he wins or dies. It's all an evening's pastime, about which blasphemous amounts of money float in the anatomy of bets and a winner-take-all purse. You accept to like the actuality that nobody's actual acute here. Everyone works off instincts of self-preservation.

Montiel drenches you in the affection of the artery and the atmosphere of the fights. He watches how bodies acknowledge to affront and abhorrence and how an ambiance can bolt bodies up in bloodlust like junkies to a fix. The fights are not attempt for voyeurism or gore. His camera, guided by Stefan Czapsky ("Batman Returns"), prowls the arena watching people's faces, while the action itself is sometimes an abashing blur.

The chat is evocative of aboriginal David Mamet: acutely inarticulate, accidental and repetitive, but alive of the close affections of its characters. An accomplished amateur such as Howard or Luis Guzman (who plays an amoral action promoter) can get astronomic breadth from such writing. Yet Channing and Henao accomplish the best of their opportunities, too: They bollix their words but still abatement in love. Meanwhile, Altagracia Guzman is accustomed to absolute abduct a brace of scenes as Henao's busy grandmother, giving the becloud its one blink of humor.

The nominal villain, played by Brian White, and a aback adventure about him and the fighter's acrid ancestor aren't absolutely realized. They are too pro forma to accept abundant credibility. So the third act is anemic and improbable, a little too neat.

No matter. "Fighting" makes both a solid additional becloud and a able flat admission for Montiel. Actuality is a adolescent filmmaker to watch.

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