‘The Fighter’ is Mark Wahlberg’s “Actor’s Project” movie. Expect plenty more from Wahlberg & the Weinstein brothers. Mark Wahlberg – he of ‘Marky Mark’ and Calvin Klein underwear print ads now makes a packet from the fictionalised account of his rise to fame in HBO’s ‘Entourage’. What attracts Wahlberg to the true story of these two boxing step brothers Dickie Elkund (Christian Bale) and Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg) from Lowell Massachusetts is the strong parallels with Wahlberg’s own life. Yes he was a boxer, yes he suffered addiction, yes he ended up on the wrong side of the law.

Dickie Elkund is the biggest thing in Lowell. Dickie trades on his past glory as a boxer and the bout where he put Sugar Ray Leonard on the mat. The film starts with a HBO documentary filming Dickie on the couch. He’s jittery, google eyed and emaciated. The film without warning or change in decor or even bothering with costume changes, flashes back to a moment several years earlier where a different camera crew is following Dicky Elkland. It’s a very different documentary. This film is called ‘Crack in America’ and Dicky Elkund is the story of a good man gone to seed. This earlier doco is all about his need to score crack and takes us inside a crack house. Instead of helping Micky train, Dickie is getting high. When he realises the time (and I’m already bored of the druggie losing track of time meme) he runs down to the gym and enters the ring to spar with his younger brother. Everybody in the room knows Dickie is high as a kite – even Mickey O’Keefe a Lowell Police officer.  In the boxing gym O’Keefe isn’t a police officer he is the coach of Micky and in past glory days Dickie.

“The Fighter” tracks the journey of Micky Ward from being the easy beat to his own journey to a title fight. It also – partially & unsuccessfully in my opinion, maps the redemption of the family. Dickie & Micky’s family has 7 sister siblings , two fathers and one extraordinary Mother (an astounding performance from Melissa Leo). In the middle of the realisation that Micky’s dream is ending he finds love across a crowded bar in the shape of Charlene Flemming (Amy Adams) a college drop out whose life is also heading in the wrong direction.

The problems with ‘The Fighter’ are many. First of all it’s an ‘Actor’s project’ so you can see everybody acting their shoes off in just about every scene. Only Amy Adams, Melissa Leo and Micky O’Keefe feel real. Secondly - and it’s ‘a chip on my shoulder that could feed the Red Army’ – to borrow a quote from Geraint Anderson is the playing of lower class lives for cheap laughs to break the tension in the drama. Lastly it is the appalling stereotypes. I shouldn’t be surprised. This is Hollywood.

I’m sure life in Lowell is working class, and aspirations are not as grand as say a University town – but instead of making these aspirations something to believe in and fight for, this movie makes them seem perfect for this class to aspire too – but certainly not you or me. These working class aspirations are especially not for the people on the other side of the camera.

The tech credits owe more to art house movies than to ‘The Hurricane’ or ‘Raging Bull’. If you can follow the timeline with the editing then by all means please explain it to me. The print stock is grainy making the whole thing look like it’s made for TV. It’s a deliberate decision to cheapen the whole working class experience of ‘The Fighter’. Artificial enhancement to make ‘The Fighter’ appear viscerally real.

The fabulous Christian Bale (remember ‘Empire of the Sun’?) unfortunately is nowhere to be seen in this film instead we have the not so fabulous Christian Bale (‘American Pyscho’, ‘The Prestige’). Bale ticks, jiggers, jumps and oogles his eyes around in the ‘The Fighter’ like Stanislavski on crack. Hang on. Stanislavski would expect his method actors to be on crack.

Bale starved himself for the role and his portrait of crack addled punch drunk ex boxer just screams academy award performance. It’s exactly what it’s designed to be, and you can see him acting in every single frame of this picture and you know the ticks, hics oggles and jitteryness isn’t there on film for you and me. No no no, it’s there on film for the eligible members of the Academy. Secondly this is not a supporting actor role, it’s a leading part in the film. Oh and because Bale is chewing celluloid for every second of this film, we are shown the real Dickie and Micky over the credits. Yes Dickie does have enough jiggers and ticks to give credence to Bale’s performance. Did the producers and director feel that Bale’s performance needed that level of justification?

Amy Adams is (yet again) a revelation as Charlene, giving this streetwise girl some smarts and attitude. Even when there is a girl on girl cat fight at the films point of no return (read Syd Field) Adams keeps it physical and in character. Wahlberg has a physicality to him that works in these kind of roles (remember his breakout role in ‘Boogie Nights’). He has a boxers build, a boxer’s gait and boxer’s physicality. He was born for this role. The bit players are all great especially Mickey O’Keefe playing himself on film and the astounding performance of Melissa Leo.

There’s a great film in ‘The Fighter’ somewhere but it needs a recast in a couple of pivotal roles and it certainly needs better production skills (starting with editing and production design) than what is on display here. We’ve seen this film before DeNiro in ‘Raging Bull’, Russell Crowe in ‘Cinderella Man’, Denzel Washington in ‘The Hurricane’, yet today in my mind the most believable boxer in all of them is Wahlberg.