Film review: The Fighter (15)

The hardest rounds are the early ones, when you're up against yourself. Boxing is easy by comparison, slugging it with a stranger till someone drops.

But family, that's 12 rounds of heavy head-banging before you reach your second bowl of Cheerios.

Dicky Eklund had his shot, so the legend goes, and he took Sugar Ray the distance, a knock down buying him legend status in Lowell. (Although it may have been a slip, all depends on who you're rooting for.) A wiry feller, Dicky, he was ducking and diving from the cradle, taking shots like they were his birthright.

So when it goes, that fame? That opportunity?

Drugs, maybe, to fill the void. A head full of could-have-beens and freight your understated brother with your unfinished stories and tales of second chances.

Christian Bale's slippery Dicky takes this movie but that's because his low-key brother Mark Walhberg gives him room.

Micky needs Dicky to be Dicky just as much as he needs him to be so not Dicky.

That's Micky's dilemma and going toe to toe with some meat from Mexico is easy maths by comparison.

Then there's Mommy Dearest and the Greek chorus of ugly sisters who idolise the loser and patronise the brother.

Mommy knows best and she doesn't take kindly to Micky getting serious, shedding the baggage and the pounds to give it a go, late on in life (he's 31).

Fortunately, into Micky's corner, as he tries to extricate himself from deadbeat fights to take a proper shot, steps firecracker girlfriend Charlene (Amy Adams) who hits below the belt and finds the words shy Micky can't say.

This is a film about room. Room to think. Room to dream. Room away from the mullet haired trollops who have it all figured so tight there's no room to be wrong. The ring is a vast tract of prairie land by comparison.

David O Russell shoots this true story like a '70s blue collar grunge epic with road crews gulping cool Bud in sweat tops.

But this is the early '90s with it's MTV, crack pipes and ESPN fight night specials.

And while this has all the trappings of a Rocky for the new millennium, this is a much more convincing proposition as a piece of authentic, down and dirty film-making.

This is a film about family, tensions below the surface and if Wahlberg (who does the boxing well) unleashes his unvoiced fury in the ring, it is catharsis rather than cliche that drives his fists.

– From February 2011