★ ½
A pushover high-school teacher accidentally gets a colleague fired, and so the latter challenges him to a fist fight that day after classes end. If that were the plot of a half-hour sitcom, you’d probably be wondering: “Is there a B-plot to go along with that? Because that doesn’t seem like enough to fill up 30 minutes of screen time.” Now take that flimsy contrivance, stretch it out to a 91-minute comedy, and you can start to understand how unbearable Fist Fight is.
Charlie Day is said pushover English teacher Andy Campbell, Ice Cube is terrifying history teacher Ron Strickland, and the public school where they work is a nightmarish dystopia where the kids play elaborate pranks all day and the principal (Dean Norris) is looking to fire everyone he possibly can in order to meet budget cuts. Things come to a head when a student keeps using a smartphone app to turn off the TV while Strickland is trying to show his class a documentary, and he retaliates by taking an axe to the offender’s desk; when the principal makes it clear that either Strickland or Campbell (who was in the room at the time) will take the fall for this, Campbell refuses to honor the code of silence among teachers and rats Strickland out. Cue threats of a beatdown from Strickland, desperate attempts to avoid it, life lessons learned, etc.
What really undermines Fist Fight is that it can’t commit to a single tone: It’s so cartoonish it’s tough to believe anything here is happening in our universe (pretty sure a teacher who attacks a student with an axe is going to jail, no questions asked), yet it still need us to care about these people so we’ll be invested in character arcs that would have seemed formulaic in 1985. Would you believe that Campbell is too nice and doesn’t like confrontation, and that his wife (JoAnna Garcia Swisher) feels he needs to man up if he’s going to keep his job? Or that he gives a rousing speech about how the school’s budget cuts are a tragedy before the movie is up? Or that he’s worried about making it to his young daughter’s talent show on time? (Maybe the weirdest part about how clichéd this film is: Christina Hendricks plays a sexy, badass French teacher who seems like she’s meant to be a love interest for Campbell, whose wife is initially portrayed as a joyless nag. But by the end, Campbell’s wife is suddenly much nicer, while Hendricks’ character plays no real role in the plot whatsoever. What happened there?)
If there was any way to make Fist Fight work, it would have required the filmmakers to really embrace the absurdity of its premise and go fully surreal with a high school that’s basically an asylum run by the inmates. They manage to do that with a few choice gags -- a meth-addled horse that’s roaming the hallways, a mariachi band the students have hired to follow the principal around -- but it’s not enough to redeem one of the laziest studio comedies of the last few years.