The Fighter

Directed by David O. Russell

(R)

***

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This gritty new boxing movie dances “dangerously close to the corny,” said Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. The story of Micky Ward—a real-life fighter from blue-collar Lowell, Mass., who can find glory in the ring only by stepping out of the shadow of his older brother—it eventually resorts to “teary triumphalism” to pull its disparate pieces together. But what keeps us riveted most of the way is Ward’s large, overbearing family, said David Ansen in Newsweek. As Micky, Mark Wahlberg is a quiet but “fiercely loyal” kid brother, while Christian Bale is “poisonously good” as their mother’s favorite, a gregarious one-time contender now addicted to crack and spiraling downward. The main suspense comes from wondering which siblings will emerge from the family’s “rat’s nest of co-dependence and self-destruction.” The Fighter “handles itself well in the ring,” said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. But led by Wahlberg’s and Bale’s “phenomenal performances,” the film does even better in the domestic arena. Don’t think of it as a new Rocky; its “spectacularly toxic” family could have come from a Eugene O’Neill play.