the boxing scenes in the movie Fighter

As I mentioned several times in this blog, the first thing i want to see in a movie is a good script. It doesn't have to be the greatest story ever but it has to have a good script written by a person who knows what he is doing.

Last night, my wife and I watched the movie Fighter, starring Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale. Actually, I translated the movie into Turkish when it was first released here, but of course the subtitles were not mine this time when we watched it.
 
The movie is about boxer Micky Ward and how he won the title. It is indeed a great story. Well now, real life stories tend to be trickier because the story is already there and you can't twist it to make more appaling. And I beleive this movie has a great script, focusing on the conflicts this Micky guy has, instead of making a pure boxing movie.

I particularly loved this film because there were really some very solid similarities between his life and mine especially when it comes to family ties. It struck me the first time I translated it, and it struck me again yesterday while I was watching it. And my wife too, shared the very same feeling with me.

So I checked some of the reviews this movie got, and saw that a lot of people disliked it because it didn't cover Ward's presumably the best boxing matches. Well, I am totally Greek to American boxing scene so I can't know about that, but I wonder: "Does it have to?"

I mean, first of all, this is not a Rocky movie. It is not about boxing entirely. It has boxing scenes alright, but boxing is not the focal point of the story. It is about a man who becomes a champion against all the odds. The guy wins the title and it ends. It doesn't necessarily show us how great this man fights even though there might be one or two missed opportunities there, because there is an incredible knockout which could have been handled glamorously.  Yet, you enjoy those scenes as they are.

From the script point of view, it would be rather far-fetched if it actually tried to cover all the great matches Ward had.  And the story would have get lost. As I told you, making a story out of real life experiences is indeed tricky and I am simply glad that the script doesn't fall into such traps. So I'm not sure if all those people who say that all those fights should have been included to the movie realize that it would have been a very bad movie if they had actually included all of that stuff.

And as a side note here, even though I enjoy Mark Wahlberg's acting in general, the star of this movie was actually Christian Bale, doing a great job while perfoming Ward's elder brother. You realize what a great job he had done when you watch a piece of original video of these people at the end of the film.