Review: ‘Fist Fight’: good fight buried under a stupid plot

In an ideal world, Fist Fight would be a Lovecraftian tale about Mr. Campbell (Charlie Day), a high-school English teacher tasked to teach in a school where everyone is insane, violent, mad, and absolutely absurd. Over time, he slowly but surely loses his own sanity and embraces the oblivion that Roosevelt High exudes. Instead, Fist Fight is buried under layers and layers and layers of fat.

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Its absurd plot seems as if it was wrought to meaningless existence by writers who never graduated from teenage testosterone. Everything about this high school is a teenager’s wet dream: students can play pranks and masturbate to porn all day and the teachers can brawl it out in fist fights. Heck, Christina Hendricks’s role as the sultry drama teacher Miss Monet offers not a single addition to the plot other than eye candy to the students. She literally does nothing but walk slowly for passing eyes to see.

It attempts to justify its manic plot by setting the story on the last day of school, when the seniors do whatever the hell they want. As much as they want this to be the justification, the “last day of school” trope is just vestigial set dressing to prolong the inevitable fist fight (to fill out the match card, so to speak). Its only contribution to the titular fight is even negligible. Strickland (Ice Cube) goes on an ax-wielding rampage with a desk after a student pranks him by remote-controlling the AV system Strickland was using. This, in turn, leads to Campbell tattling on Strickland and the latter challenging the former to a fist fight after school. For an environment that’s perfectly fine with students stealing a horse from a race track, the one thing the writers use to set off the movie’s events is a harmless remote control. While it reinforces Strickland’s unhinged nature, it also trivializes the anything-goes “last day of school” setting.

I understand that Fist Fight tries to be a parody of the devolving school system across the globe, but I think there’s a better way to execute that. Fist Fight’s terrible plotting conveys the opposite message. In fact, it’s so inconsistent that it hurts my brain cells. For instance, after enduring so much, Campbell breaks down from all the pranks and decries the corrupt school administration, but, in the very next scene, tells his daughter to break the rules so she can get what she wants.

Fight Fist makes no goddamned sense. It wants to criticize the unruly system, but its supposedly rational hero for doing so is as sniveling and despicable as they come. He resorts to planting drugs, bribery, and libel to get out of the fist fight. As the movie concludes, its final message is to embrace the chaos. Campbell turns into a badass and Strickland hints that he instigated the fight so he can call attention to how screwed up the system is. So, is it embrace the chaos to be a force for good? It’s a wacky plot I’ve seen better executed in another movie with “fight” in its name—Fight Club, except Strickland is real. Campbell even goes so far as repeating a line from the movie: “Why’d you hit me in the ear?” It just falls flat here with its inane jokes.

But Fist Fight’s humor is smart, at times. For instance, there’s a gag where Ice Cube, in true N.W.A. style, says “Fuck the police” to a police officer. Smart as it can be, its jokes are buried in stupid plot tropes and dumb slapstick. Tracy Morgan and unintentionally funny Ice Cube can at least carry the humor. Charlie Day, however, didn’t quite work as the spoilsport white collar; leave that role to Jason Bateman.

For what it’s worth, the titular fight was exciting to watch. It was equal parts MMA and WWE, mixed together in an unholy union. This is the main event we paid to watch, but had to wade through a crappy midcard for. Taken on its own, the fist fight was a good orchestration of violence around the school. But again, it’s largely inconsistent with the plot. Having previously established that Campbell is a scrawny weakling who can’t even throw a punch, he suddenly develops the ability to deliver hurricanranas and take powerbombs to the cement pavement. How did he evolve from Gillberg to Rey Mysterio in less than a day? Bent movie logic!

Overall, Fist Fight feels like it should’ve been a YouTube series with Campbell and Strickland getting themselves in misadventures in a prank high school. With the way its “lessons” don’t carry over from scene to scene, an episodic way of tackling Fist Fight might dull the brain pain. Instead, we have a movie where its writers want to say “hey, watch our stupid humor because we’ve got fighting teachers,” using its titular fist fight as an advertising afterthought.