Wouldn’t Mind Getting Into This ‘Fight’

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‘FIST FIGHT’ TRAILER REVIEW

When a mild-mannered high school teacher (Charlie Day) inadvertently angers his feared co-worker (Ice Cube), he finds himself in over his head when he’s challenged to an after-school fight. While everything about this trailer looks fairly ridiculous, that could also be the movie’s strength. Fist Fight opens in wide release Feb. 17.

PAIGE: Basically this movie looks like a rehash of every odd-couple random premise movie released in the last five years, except this time, everyone is an a**hole.

JAIMIE: There are so many ridiculous things going on in this trailer. So, so many. Like, why is Christina Hendricks here? I feel like everything about this movie is a clich that a thousand other movies already have done. And maybe they thought that making it about one adult bullying another adult in school would make it different enough — eh, not so much.

PAIGE: I realize that we can’t always be flipping the scripts and change takes time, but what a surprise that the violent destroyer of public property is a black man, and the white guy is just a straight-up wimp. I don’t know that switching that up would be better (in that case you’d have to cast Kevin Hart as the type-A black man who just wants to live a peaceful life except for all the lunatics around him), and I don’t know if there IS a racial casting solution that makes this OK, which probably goes to show that this movie is dumb with a dumb premise that no one thought about outside the planning stage.

CHRISTINA: This does look pretty ridiculous, but I found myself laughing at parts of the trailer, which usually doesn’t happen in comedy trailers for me. Is there potential here? Maybe.

PAIGE: I did like that line about meth being not the gateway drug, but the finish line.

JAIMIE: If I were really, really, really tired and came across it on TV late one night, I might pause and find some parts of it funny. Mostly because Charlie Day has this way of making everything feel so absurd and frenetic.

CHRISTINA: I am a big fan of Charlie Day. His characters are usually pretty over-the-top, yet he finds a way to make them super endearing. Like, every time I watch It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, I always just want to take Charlie home and take care of him. Can Charlie Day be my new puppy?

NICOLE: Why does Charlie have to be an English teacher? It’s not as fun seeing him be a responsible adult. I agree that Charlie in It’s Always Sunny is the best — he makes Dee and Dennis bearable for some reason.

PAIGE: Another thing that strikes me as dangerous is this wild buildup to the eponymous fist fight, which is inevitably going to disappoint, unless, of course, it ends up being an insane game of hide-and-seek that crosses the whole campus as one teacher hunts the other.

NICOLE: I’d be pretty upset if I find out the fight doesn’t actually happen and they use their words to resolve the conflict — recognizing that using your words is how you should resolve conflict.