Every once and a while a sweet fighting movie comes along: “Enter the Dragon”, “Blood Sport”, and “Fight Club”. Lately, I have been hungering for a movie to give me sweet hand to hand combat and action sequences that make me wanna kill a man. Well, thanks to Channing Tatum’s “Fighting” I finally want to kill a man again. Unfortunately, that man is me.

Before I get into the main reason I hate this film let me first label this movie correctly: The Crappy LionHeart. Lionheart starred JVCD and was a classic tale of man beating ass for money, managers trying to make money off of emotionally fueled fists, and overcoming Goliaths as a soft-spoken David.

Tatum tried following Van Dam’s foot steps by giving an oscar worthy acting performance, but he lacked in the pointless splits performance. If you don’t do the splits at some point in the movie the audience can’t take you serious as a fighter.

Fighter Split List

• Van Dam – Splits (every film ever)
• Sylvester Stallone – Splits (somewhere in Rocky III I’m sure)
• Hulk Hogan – Splits (Suburban Commando & Mr. Nanny)

Peaked too Early

The meat of the reason this movie is horrible comes from one line in the trailer. Tatum says, “I’ve been nothing my whole life. I’m not going back to that.”

Really? You are like mid 20’s. Nothing your whole life, huh? Well, you are still young. Take some classes. Learn a skill useful in society. Not until after high school can you really even start to make something of yourself. Plus, what a horrible standpoint? If people do not know who you are then you are worthless?

The message of the film appears to be fighting is ok, but only if you are doing it for the right reasons… Like not being a nobody.

To be fair to Tatum, this role is just a leapfrog role that gets him to his next film “GI Joe: Rise of Cobra”. He plays Duke, and if he wants to be a bad-ass action start/fighter…he better do the splits.