Witless ‘Fist Fight’ pits one dopey teacher against another
Although “Fist Fight” — a comedy about a beef between two feuding high school teachers — culminates in the promised slugfest, evidence indicates it’s the creators of this rope-a-dopey farce who took too many blows to the head.
The jokes, by screenwriters Van Robichaux and Evan Susser, have all the wit of a punch-drunk palooka. And the direction by Richie Keen (“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”) is lead-footed. The slapsticky, sight-gag-heavy yukfest, which is filled with the kind of phallic humor you may have sniggered at when you were 16, floats like a dead butterfly and stings like a B-movie.
The two pugilists in question are Mr. Campbell (Charlie Day), a whiny English teacher, and Mr. Strickland (Ice Cube), a nononsense history teacher who is a more unhinged version of “Lean on Me’s” baseball-bat-toting Joe Clark. When Strickland loses his cool in front of his class, taking a fireman’s ax to a misbehaving student’s desk, Campbell rats on him to the principal (Dean Norris), leading to Strickland’s threat of an after-school showdown.
Much of the film consists of Campbell’s ineffectual efforts to forestall the inevitable, in a grown-up evocation of the 1987 comedy “Three O’Clock High” (a far better film about a wuss trying to avoid a beatdown by a schoolyard bully).
These efforts include seeking the protection of the nerdy campus security guard (Kumail Nanjiani) and framing Strickland by planting drugs in his bag, a plan that is hatched in consultation with the school’s harebrained athletic coach (Tracy Morgan), who jokes about having sex with parents, and a creepy faculty colleague (Jillian Bell), who jokes about having sex with students — not to mention using meth. Those are some talented supporting actors, but all three are wasted in roles that are essentially cartoon characters.
While “Fist Fight” tries to evince the same brand of gleeful depravity of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” — a mix of the jaunty and the jaundiced that also stars Day — the film only manages to achieve a sour mood of dyspeptic irritation with the status quo. There are lots of jokes about the dysfunction of the public education system, but mostly the film’s moral is about winning at any cost.