For so many men, high school is spent posturing. Who has the deepest musical knowledge? Who has the most expensive clothes? Who can make the dirtiest joke? Who remembers the most obscure athletes? Who could fight what animal? Who can care the least? These performances are the foundational dick-measuring texts of stereotypically shallow male friendships, those of King of the Hill’s beer-sipping neighbors saying “yep” to each other day after day. Miguel Wants to Fight, a Hulu comedy as gracelessly straightforward as its title, understands the pressure to pose. Its teen friend group blusters and shoots bull, riffs on anime and jacking off, and, at the drop of a hat, gets into scuffles. There’s not much movie to its guileless, repetitive simplicity—and not much comedy to that “not much movie”—but it evokes an adolescent understanding that image is everything.
To that end, Miguel Wants to Fight pushes a specific, reference-forward vision of high school. Its kids, whose bedrooms sport wall-to-wall posters of Bruce Lee or basketball, munch Takis as they bum around their neighborhood. They hang out around the TV while someone gets their ass kicked by Sekiro. They make fan films of themselves doing Naruto moves. They really love talking about cranking it. David (Christian Vunipola), Cass (Imani Lewis) and Srini (Suraj Partha) are recognizable high school doofuses who think they’re way badder than they are. Miguel (Tyler Dean Flores) only stands out through his pacifism.
But Miguel is not a conscientious objector, or disloyal, or a coward, or particularly self-aware. It’s just shaken out that he’s never really gotten involved when his friends throw down. He’s a victim of circumstance, which isn’t an especially compelling character trait—though you get the impression that the rowdy Cass and Srini would pressure him into bloodying his knuckles regardless of his motives. It’s a miracle he hasn’t gotten into a scrape simply through proximity: Theirs is a world of boxing murals and basketball court scuffles; hell, Miguel’s dad (Raúl Castillo) works at a boxing gym. Fighting is everywhere. That pressure, combined with a classic high school boogeyman—the looming move out of town—gives Miguel an ultimatum: It’s now or never to put on a final, violent show for his friends.
Finding a suitable combatant and then successfully goading them (the friends’ only rule of engagement is that Miguel can’t throw the first punch) forms his quest’s loose sitcom structure. Opponents are considered, don’t work out, and we move on. Writers Shea Serrano and Jason Concepcion (who went from hosting a movie podcast together at The Ringer to writing together on Serrano’s Freevee show Primo) take the sheen off this Nickelodeon plot by stripping it of any real point aside from “high schoolers are numbskulls” and letting their characters swear like real, paint-peeling high schoolers.
Director Oz Rodriguez (who, aside from a slew of comedy TV, made the charming Vampires vs. the Bronx for Netflix) adds his ability with young actors, establishing an easy rapport between a cast mostly trafficking in punched-up jokes delivered when characters are off-screen. Partha benefits most from this—he sells the fast-talking Srini’s underwhelming patter with energetic dedication—though Flores is also winning as a classic squirrely little guy squeaking out some desperate teen angst. Lewis and Vunipola don’t have much material to stand out on their own (David is the studious voice of reason, implied to be so because his boxer dad is dead; Cass is a girl), though they make the scenes where the group sits around killing time with Apatow riffing feel complete, if not engaging.
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