Jamie
The premise of the year-long cycle is to get a whole mess of great BMT films and feed Franchise Man till he’s big and fat. Unfortunately this is also creating some angst when it comes to the always tricky Chain Reaction entry in the cycle. We have to keep on moving backwards and so how can we be sure to pick up the best of the best when we need to connect Fool’s Paradise to some random film from 2016-2022? It’s one step too far and means that instead of watching the Stephen King catastrophe of an adaptation, The Dark Tower, we instead insist on watching Fist Fight starring Charlie Day… Fist Fight?! Fist Fight. What are we doing here? A double bonus week, that’s what we’re doing. Now you might be saying “Hey wait, aren’t you guys always falling behind? And you’re going to do a double bonus week for no reason?” The answer to that is simple. Yes and yes.
To recap, Charlie Day is a teacher with an expanding family, a lack of backbone, and a tenuous hold on his job. It’s the end of the year and pink slips are being given out at an alarming rate all while Senior Prank Day is going unchecked by the administration. His fellow teacher, Ice Cube, faces this power vacuum by levying out corporal punishment and verbal tirades against the kids in his class to the point where it is upsetting. When Charlie points out a prankster in his midsts, Ice Cube goes nuclear and ultimately Charlie has to tattle on him to try to keep his job. Now the target of Ice Cube, Charlie spends the rest of the last day of school trying to prevent Ice Cube from beating him up in the parking lot after school. This involves attempting to bribe the kid you told on Ice Cube to recant his statement (he does, but the fight is still on) and trying to get Ice Cube arrested (which ends up with both of them in jail). Once back at school Charlie becomes jaded by the lack of care that the superintendent is giving to laying off his fellow teachers and grows a backbone. He lays into him and storms off to be at his daughter’s talent show. There they perform a crude rendition of a song, further cementing Charlie as a “bad boy who doesn’t give a – shut your mouth.” Jazzed up on all this backbone, Charlie heads back to the school where he battles Ice Cube and holds his own. At the end he finds out that his wife is giving birth and he and Ice Cube make up. Using the publicity that the fight generated, Charlie is able to help everyone keep their jobs and gets the school more money. THE END.
Fist Fight is way better than I expected it to be. You can see clearly why someone would read the script and be like “oh yeah, this setup has a lot of potential.” It’s like a spoof film in how far they take the bit about the kids running rampant over the school. We also get Kumail Nanjiani in a funny role and a musical act involving Day and his kid that is actually amusing rather than cringey. The only issue I had was a reliance on improvisation for the script. Someone still has to say something funny once in a while for the improv to work. Apparently people didn’t for long stretches of time. Either that or they were choosing the wrong takes. Still it was better than I thought it would be and the final fight more or less paid off so I’m not sure what happened with the reviews. Maybe critics just didn’t like Day spending a five minute section in the middle of the film shooting a commercial for Apple.
Hot Take Clam Bake! Ice Cube killed Charlie Day in the final fight. He punched him in the face and shattered his skull and Charlie Day died. Notice how everything worked out so well for everyone after he got his skull caved in and he (allegedly) didn’t die? That’s because he (not so allegedly) actually did die. Ice Cube killed him, went to jail, and then the school had to shut down when Day’s wife sued the town for his wrongful death and won a whole boatload of money and everyone lived happily ever after (except Ice Cube (and Charlie Day because he died)). Hot Take Temperature: Macbook Pro
Patrick?
Patrick
‘Ello everyone! Are we talking about Hollywood megastar and definitely leading man Charlie Day fighting Hollywood megastar and perennial mean-one-in-an-unlikely-movie-odd-couple Ice Cube? Let’s go!
The movie is definitely funnier than expected. Nanjiani and Day in particular are both quite good in their parts, and I laughed more than once. That is an unexpectedly high number of times to laugh during a bad comedy. I usually laugh zero times. Or even worse, somehow a bad comedy peers into my soul and erases previously laughs from my life, making me sadder both now and in the past somehow.
I like that they didn’t pull punches with Ice Cube in the film. He isn’t just kind of mean. He isn’t just kind of rough around the edges. He is a genuine psycho who should definitely have been fired.
If anything one of the major issues of the film is what I’d call the Sandler Effect. In (mostly older) Adam Sandler films there is often a moment where he for one reason or another decides to beat the shit out of someone. Sure this person usually seems to have it coming in some ways, but still, Sandler assaults this person and then (worse) the movie twists itself and bends reality to convince you that this was definitely the correct thing to do, thus doubling down on what is already a bad message.
In this film Ice Cube is a psycho who hacks a desk to pieces and deserves to be fired. After getting his just desserts he turns around and decides to fight Day for the somewhat tenuous reason of “snitches get stitches”. Cool, he’s a psycho so this logically makes sense. But then the twist’em’ups keeps coming. Now Ice Cube figures there is no reason to fight Day because he’s a coward, but he needs to show kids that actions (getting Ice Cube fired for being a psycho) have consequences (beating up Day in front of the school) … uh okay, you’re a psycho so that logic I guess still makes sense. But then in the end Ice Cube even acknowledges that this would be fruitless, but he is still going to beat the shit out of Day because then the world will see how the broken U.S. education system has pitted teacher against teacher and yada yada yada change or whatever. Which is … that is well beyond lunatic behavior and now is into a realm of nonsense all unto itself. But then what does the movie do? Twist itself up and bends reality to vindicate Ice Cube and that is precisely what happens! People see the teacher fight and the school saves its teachers and everything lives happily ever after, hooray! Crazy.
The second weirdest bit is the Apple commercial that occurs in the middle of the film where Day buys multiple Apple MacBook Pros with AppleCare and his wife is like “THIS COMPUTER IS AWESOME!” C’mon now.
So yeah. This film kind of feels like a movie I would have written in creative writing class when I was 16 complete with messy nonsensical third act.
It might win the Product Placement (What?) for the Apple MacBook ad in the middle of the film. I think I’m going with Super Secret Holiday Film (When?) for the last day of school which does come up in other films with some relative frequency. And yeah, I’m going with a Worst Twist (How?) for the inevitable conclusion that Day doesn’t win the fight, but that he does well enough that everyone respects him a bit more. I think the film is closest to Good, I laughed a few times.
Read about my Hollywood-esque sequel to the film in the quiz. Cheerios,
The Sklogs
Bad Movie Twins 