Fist Fight—Charlie Day is Andy Campbell, a milquetoast
English teacher at an underfunded, underachieving, metal-detector-enclosed high
school. Ice Cube is Strickland, a tough history teacher. It’s the last day of
school, the odious, arrogant students are playing outrageous pranks, and the
teachers are re-interviewing for their jobs in the face of layoffs. Things are
tense.
Andy witnesses
Strickland violently lose it front of his class, and faced with the prospect of
losing his job if he doesn’t, he “rats out” Strickland to the principal. On the
familiar grounds that “snitches get stitches,” Strickland then challenges Andy
to the title combat after school.
The rest of this
broad, crude, foul-mouthed comedy, directed by Richie Keen from a script by Van
Robichaux and Evan Susser, involves Andy frantically resorting to ever more
dishonorable and humiliating tactics in an attempt to avoid this fight. In
outline, the plot is very much like that of 1987’s Three O’Clock High, except featuring teachers instead of students.
Ultimately, of course, in the grand tradition of movies, Andy and Strickland
must face off—if they didn’t, the title would be a cheat.
It’s an indefensibly
stupid, ill-conceived, mostly unfunny, often offensive movie. So of course, I
feel compelled to defend it a little. A very, very little.
First of all, the
actors are good. Day, a veteran nitwit from the Horrible Bosses movies and It’s
Always Sunny in Philadelphia, fearlessly plays shamelessness. He isn’t the
customary cinematic comical coward, like Bob Hope or Woody Allen, making his
avoidance of peril into a self-deprecating dignity—he’s palpably willing to
abase himself, and the effect is painful, verging at times on poignancy.
Tracy Morgan brings
his querulous, imploring tones to the part of the perennially losing football
coach, and he’s pretty funny. Jillian Bell
is even funnier as a guidance counselor who seems desperately in need of
guidance herself. Only Christina Hendricks, as a possibly psychotic French
teacher, seems wasted, although I suppose no footage which features Christina
Hendricks walking down the hallway in a form-fitting black dress can be
considered a total waste.
Ice Cube is always
effortlessly commanding, even in a role like this, which aside from being one-note
is saddled with a major idiocy at its core. The moviemakers try to sell us
on the idea that Strickland’s rage is because he’s fed up with the disrespect
of students and the indifference of his colleagues, and that he’s insisting on
going through with his challenge to Andy on the grounds that a fight between
two teachers will somehow showcase the problems faced by those in their
profession.
This is ludicrous, certainly, but it may point to the reason why, as terrible as Fist Fight is, the movie can’t be called dull. It draws a certain
degree of dramatic potency from the near-impossible situation in which public
school teachers in poorer districts find themselves—constant frustration if they
care about their jobs and their students, soulless defeat if they give up. The
dumb fight-between-teachers plot, even though it was probably the inspiration
for the picture, is also a weight around its neck. It’s possible to see how,
with the same cast and setting, something could have been made that was at
least equally funny but genuinely trenchant.
