Two teachers find themselves at odds at the end of a super long day, waiting for a Fist Fight. Ice Cube and Charlie Day star as high school teachers prepared to solve their differences the hard way. On the last day of the year, mild-mannered high school English teacher Andy Campbell (Day) is trying his best to keep it together amidst senior pranks, a dysfunctional administration and budget cuts that put jobs on the line. But things go from bad to worse when he accidentally crosses his much tougher and deeply feared colleague, Ron Strickland (Ice Cube), who challenges Campbell to an old-fashioned throw-down after school. News of the fight spreads like wildfire and ends up becoming the very thing this school, and Campbell, needed. Fist Fight is directed by first time director Richie Keen, and is rated R for adult language throughout, sexual content/nudity and drug material.

Fist Fight appears to take place in an alternate dimension where adults nor students endure the consequences of animalistic actions. For a by-the-numbers R-rated comedy where brainless activity is all the fuss, Keen’s film has brief underlying moments of 21st century public school depiction, offering a reflective stare into our own fundamentals with such. In this post-apocalyptic setting of sorts, the students are treated soft, and the teachers are walked all over like spineless jellyfish. Considering that this is a movie that takes place entirely on Senior Prank Day, it’s easy to comprehend that some limits would be tested within the very student body of this fictional school, but the script for Fist Fight nearly translates this to a Young Adult novel where the youth have taken over. A Twilight Zone backdrop if you will, of vandalism, student-teacher sexual relations, and drug trading that is treated like just another daily activity. This is perhaps my biggest problem with Fist Fight; its astounding nature to look the other way in a consequence-less society that tries to establish any kind of rules or structure to its script. Cube’s character is fired for taking a weapon to a student’s desk, yet he’s allowed to stay at the school until the end of the day? There’s security everywhere, but the teachers and students have weapons inside every bag or pocket? This stuff is easy to dispatch when you mention “It’s just another silly comedy”, but without believability this is one story that never goes above the dumbed down capacity that it entails, cutting itself short as a breakout hit behind every corner.

The comedy certainly isn’t a problem. There were several times in the movie where the straight man approach of Charlie Day’s character blending with the hard knocks of Ice Cube’s made for a truly endearing combination of these two different kinds of comedy style that fit like a glove. The wise decision here is to make this an R-rated picture because a lot of its material would feel watered down with the very setting of a world where rules don’t exist. The R rating doesn’t feel like a gimmick here, simply to use and abuse the power of curse words to give it an adult feel. Instead, they are sparsely saved to bring out the strongest reaction (Mostly by Day) to a line of humor that sometimes requires the audience to do a double take, questioning if they really just heard that. Some of my favorite scenes were in the interactions of Day with Tracy Morgan, the latter being the kind of corner man to the former’s cowardice with picking a fight with the toughest man in school. Their bond feels like a genuine friendship between two colleagues who go through year after year of torture from a student body that shows them no respect in mental or physical altercations. For laughs alone, people are going to get everything they came for, with the strongest point in the script for this material definitely being in the opening half hour.

Besides a strong comedic backbone, the film was unfortunately weighed down heavily in the second and third acts with predictable material that offered nothing fresh or original to this take. After the first act, with all of the subplots and character traits to the film revealed, it was quite easy to detect where these character arcs and scenarios were headed, keeping my intrigue to a minimum at how slow the 85 minute sit was treading by. The entirety of the movie is building up to this confrontation that takes us all the way to the final fifteen minutes of the movie. I wasn’t entirely disappointed with the fight, because the action
and fight choreography felt real to the situations of two every-men duking it out, but the problem is more about the lasting result. Without spoiling anything, I can say that this script does play it far too safely with how neatly tucked away the closing moments of the fight were. It’s not quite the Martha moment of Batman Vs Superman, but it’s not too far off either. Multiply that with a crowd of violence-hungry youths, and you leave us with a fight that not only doesn’t go the distance, but also doesn’t translate any better to the lack of moral fabric that this movie has lacked for its entirety on its characters.

One thing I was grateful for, was to see Charlie Day getting a starring role for once. Day continues to be not only one of the best reactionary actors, but also one of the most genuinely funny actors going today. What works so brilliantly with his casting in this film is physically he is clearly against a stacked deck here when compared to his physically superior antagonist, but there’s great delight in seeing the intellect of Charlie at work, even if it doesn’t always work to the best of his advantage. He was probably the only character in the film that felt like a human being, and a lot of that comes from the film not trying to make him into a cartoonish outline of that character that happens in spades from the teenagers and adults around him. I also greatly enjoyed Jillian Bell handing in another noteworthy performance as a supporting cast. Bell was great in 22 Jump Street, and she continues that momentum with another helping of her dry stick that always thinks one step ahead of the ears of the listeners. Jillian fills in the gaps when Day can’t always carry the load, and the duo make sweet gut-busting deliveries that at least kept my funny-bone oiled when my mind went numb.

Fist Fight gets knocked out late in movie by an unavoidable cloud of predictable material and anarchist setting that hinders any grasp of believability. For mindless fun, this one will give you a rentals chance of an entertaining evening inside, even if the showdown of Day and Cube doesn’t live up to its imposing marketing. Keen’s debut leaves more to be desired, and doesn’t quite have the stand-up game to last ten rounds with smarter, meaningful, and all around better comedies.

5/10