Lead-footed farce has no lift-off

Director: Stars:

Richie Keen Ice Cube, Charlie Day and Tracy Morgan ALTHOUGH Fist Fight – a comedy about two feuding high-school teachers – culminates in the promised slugfest, evidence would suggest that it’s the creators of this rope-a-dope farce who took too many blows to the head.

The jokes have all the wit of a punch-drunk palooka, and the direction by Keen is a lead-footed affair. The slapsticky, sight-gagheavy yukfest floats like a dead butterfly, and stings like a B-movie.

The two pugilists are Mr Campbell (Charlie Day), a whiny English teacher, and Mr Strickland (Ice Cube), a no-nonsense history teacher who is a more unhinged version of Lean on Me’s baseball bat-toting Joe Clark.

When Strickland loses his cool, taking an axe 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.

These include planting drugs in Strickland’s bag, a plan that is hatched in consultation with the school’s hare-brained 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.

While Fist Fight tries to evince the same brand of gleeful depravity of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the film only manages to achieve a sour mood of dyspeptic irritation.

There are lots of jokes about the dysfunction of the public education system, but mostly its moral is about winning at any cost.

Some might say that’s a distinctly Trumpian worldview, an argument that may be buttressed by the fact that one of the film’s executive producers is new US Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin. – The Washington Post