Whether or not Fist Fight is high at the top of your “movies to see” list depends an awful lot on your relationship with Charlie Day. If you can’t stand Day’s high-pitched shrieking schtick, then you’re probably happy to pay money to see him get the tar knocked out of him. And if you are a fan of the It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia star, the thought of watching him take a punch to the gob likely appeals to you anyway. Day is a perennial loser, filling the role of both the schlemiel and the schlimazel at the same time on TV and in movies: He’s the guy who can’t help spilling his soup in his own lap, and he’s also the guy whose lap is a magnet for everybody else’s spilled soup. He’s an unlucky clutz.
That makes Fist Fight a near-perfect project for his star persona by virtue of its synopsis alone. Day plays Andy Campbell, an English teacher working at a frighteningly underfunded high school in Atlanta, trying to make it through the last day of class in one piece before summer vacation. He’s a self-described nice guy whose balmy, unfailing politeness is as endearing as it is grating; the kind of person whose affability invites puzzlement. He doesn’t inspire his students to greatness. He inspires them to draw dicks on the whiteboard and snicker at his efforts to do his job. Campbell’s faculty colleagues don’t help much, either, being too stressed out either to care or to function. We learn quickly that every teacher in the joint is on the chopping block, a single unflattering review away from being fired by Principal Tyler (Dean Norris).
Between the job insecurity and the kids, who are basically depicted as a roving pack of pubescent monsters, Campbell’s career sucks. After witnessing the resident faculty bruiser, Strickland (Ice Cube), chop a student’s desk to splinters with a fire axe, his career is no longer the problem. His well being is. Strickland gets canned when Campbell snitches on him to Tyler, and enraged at the betrayal, Strickland challenges Campbell to fisticuffs after school gets out. It’s as simple, as stupid, and as promising a set-up as that, no tricks to it: Two men agree to beat the tobacco juice out of each other for no other reason than to prove their manhood for all the world to see, from their students, their peers, and their families (specifically Campbell’s wife and daughter, who just love him to pieces, but are quick to point out that he’s a total pushover).
Beneath the sheer insanity of its premise, that’s what Fist Fight is all about: a toxic and outmoded category of masculinity, where the dude who tries to avoid solving problems via brute strength is bagged on by everyone in his vicinity, and the guy who’s so unhinged he thinks that going full-slasher on an admittedly obnoxious teen is rewarded for his lunacy with validations of his manliness. The film’s analysis of its leads is precisely that fundamental—Campbell is a pussy, Strickland is a man—but whether Fist Fight endorses that idea is in the eye of the beholder. Yes, there’s a payoff to the title, and yes, the climax, in which Cube and Day stage what’s essentially a hardcore wrestling match in a rundown high school. It’s gloriously bonkers, and a slapstick battle well worth the price of admission. In the end, that’s probably all that matters.