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Fighting

Directed by Dito Montiel

Written by Dito Montiel and Robert Munic

Starring Channing Tatum and Terrence Howard

Classification: 14A

two stars

Though by no means original or especially ambitious, Fighting turns out to be a surprisingly watchable B-movie, full of oddball personal touches from its director. A former punk rocker and writer, Dito Montiel had a breakout film at Sundance in 2007 with the autobiographical A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints , set in the mean streets of his youth in Astoria, Queens. Now comes his sophomore effort, an attempt at a Hollywood genre film in the absurd but entertaining mode of The Fast and the Furious .

Like the F&F franchise, Fighting focuses on an imaginary underground world of illicit sport – in this case, mixed martial-arts fighting. The film starts on the streets, as handsome Shawn MacArthur (Channing Tatum) sets up his sidewalk operation near Radio City Music Hall, selling counterfeit Harry Potter books to strangers. When some rivals try to mess up his business, Shawn defends his turf with a few good smacks.

Across the street, an old-time hustler with an effeminate drawl and a keen eye for pugilistic talent spots him. Harvey Boarden (Terrence Howard) tells Shawn he knows how to help him make $5,000, easily. Soon, he becomes his manager and then his roommate. The combination of the weasel and the hunk trying to make it in New York brings back memories of Midnight Cowboy . Don't imagine that the Harry Potter reference was completely gratuitous either, as Montiel works some pointed sword-and-sorcery references into his story. Harvey identifies himself as the magician Merlin; Shawn tells someone his last name is MacArthur, “like the knight.”

Otherwise, Fighting is a crude love letter to seventies' New York cinema but set in the present. The screen images feel elongated, including the omniscient overhead shots of the city's skyscrapers. The clubs, private rooms and ballrooms in the outer boroughs are replete with casts of outlandish extras. One scene includes a convenience store so packed with black-clad tough and trashy women they look like members of the Prostitute Gang. A fancy Korean place has beautiful transsexual hostesses.

The fight scenes serve as a tour of various decadent ethnic enclaves, where the matches have no formal rules, though frequently predictable outcomes. If, for example, there's a marble pillar in the middle of the room, you can safely bet it will soon be introduced to someone's head.

The fights feel believably brutal and every crack and thump is hair-raisingly amplified on the sound track. Nor does the movie shy away from the fact that going mano-a-mano is an intimate business. The chiselled, young, shirtless fighters have a penchant for putting scissor-holds on each other's heads. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

After the fights, Shawn and his entourage gravitate to a nightclub where he discovers it's a ridiculously small world. Not only does he meet single-mom waitress Zulay (Zulay Henao), to whom he sold a fake Harry Potter book, but he also runs into his old hometown arch rival, the arrogant Evan (Brian White). Evan is now a successful club fighter, who was once coached by Shawn's estranged father. That's about all we learn about Shawn's background, because even to mention his father usually leads to someone getting punched before the conversation can progress any further.

Tatum, who says it best when he says the least, plays Shawn as a shy mumbler who just might be smarter than he acts. In spite of the Rocky shtick, the movie has some genuinely warm moments, especially a scene where Shawn visits Zulay at her grandmother's apartment. The overprotective grandmother is played by Altagracia Guzman, the septuagenarian Dominican-American actress who played a similar role in the 2003 movie Raising Victor Vargas . She almost steals the entire film.

I say “almost” only because some points have to be awarded to the scene where Shawn steps into a crappy elevator and almost bumps into a man, passed out cold while standing upright against the elevator wall. He seems to have scored a personal knockout.

Any silly movie with a sense of humour about itself definitely wins a decision over one that tries to be serious.