Movie Review: Fist Fight

It is a rare thing in my experience that two actors were so perfectly cast for their parts in the same movie and occurs in the new film Fist Fight. Charlie Day is the perfect actor to play a very mild-mannered teacher in a nightmare school that has violence, constant pranks during what the movie called "senior pranks week" and over the top raunchy events that sometimes almost work, but most of the time, I heard nobody laughing in the audience. The actor Ice Cube is also perfectly cast in his role as the character he seems to play in all the movies he is in; a very angry bullying type of guy who always looks like he is a few seconds away from fighting someone. Underlying the main story of this movie, which is Ice Cube wanting to fight Charlie Day at the end of the school day is the subject of bullying that Day's 10-year-old daughter is also facing at her grammar school. It doesn't take this light, sometimes entertaining comedy movie about a bad high school to remind all of us, that bullying takes place in schools and also when you are an adult and have to make a living working for and with other people.

The fact that this movie is "all in" and entirely about one thing, an end of movie fight between two teachers is not enough of a strong premise to recommend this movie as an effective comedy and overall it is at best average because of my acid test for all comedy movies, which is, "did people laugh in the audience?" From the audience I was in, this movie got very few laughs, unfortunately. The appearance of Tracy Morgan is also not enough to rescue this movie as his lines were only mildly funny at best.

The scene at the end of the movie where Day's 10-year-old daughter performs a Big Sean rap song that his laced with profanities I thought was in bad taste, much like the end of the recent film "The Comedian" where a young girl is using the worst kind of foul language during her comedy act at a school.

Considering the few moderately funny moments in this film and the majority of the scenes that did not work, I cannot recommend this movie.