The Fighter has DTVC Hall of Famer Richard Norton as Ryan Travers, a kid who's framed for murder and spends five years in jail. At the same time, his parents, who thought it would be a good idea to move their family to Thailand and open a shop, get killed by a local mob boss. When Norton gets out of jail, he would like to take him and his sister back to San Francisco, but they need money, so he gets work as a longshoreman, and discovers he has a knack for underground fighting to make extra cash. That's when a fight manager takes him under his wing, and gets him into the real fight game, where he has a bout with undefeated Benny Urquidez. If only it were that simple, right? The old mob boss is back to make it tougher on Norton, and now he has to beat both the mob and Urquidez. The lesson? Don't move your family to Thailand.
This is a fun deal. It hits all the late 80s action notes you want. Norton delivers in all the ways need him to, so much so that I'm good with him being an American with an Australian accent. We don't know why he knows martial arts, and we don't care, we just want to see him in a Canadian tuxedo roundhousing stuntmen. Word on the street (or word from Ty and Brett) is in the early scenes when he's supposed to be a kid, Norton is playing a nine-year-old. If that's the case, that is too amazing for words, and the fact that Norton just went with it is even better. People were getting on Scorsese for not casting someone like Miles Teller as a young De Niro in The Irishman, but obviously he was just taking a page from fellow filmmaking luminary Anthony Maharaj.
We're now at 22 films for DTVC Hall of Famer Richard Norton, which seems like a lot, but really we have a long way to go with his filmography, and a film like this is just a start to get us caught up. In that late 80s/early 90s period that we love so much, he was one of the best, and the podcast episode I did with Brett and Ty was meant to spotlight that, and I think I'm going to try to do more of it on the site here as well. I think the thing is, I fell behind on a lot of Dolph and Seagal stuff while I was on hiatus, plus Scott Adkins is putting out 5 movies a year, so someone like Norton gets lost in the shuffle; but the reality is, I think his work from this era is consistently more enjoyable than some of what Dolph, Seagal, and Adkins are putting out now, just due to the realities of what movie making is today. For my personal tastes, I'd take the Pepsi Challenge with this up against an Acceleration, Beyond the Law, or Legacy of Lies any day, and as a result, maybe I should reconsider my priorities.
This is actually the first Anthony Maharaj directed piece I've done on here, which is a major oversight on my part (we have done Future Hunters, which he produced). Norton was something of a mainstay for him, so the fact that I haven't despite doing over 20 Norton films is a bit of surprise. I think one reason for that is I haven't done many Norton vehicles like this one, they're usually films where Norton plays a supporting part. My understanding of Maharaj is he had a bit of a Godfrey Ho or Leo Fong sensibility in making films, and this one in particular may have been a mix of a few different films, which gives us the cinematic brilliance of Norton playing a nine-year-old at the age of 39. Like we said, just go with it.
AIP distributed this film on VHS in the States, which may explain the alternate title The Kick Fighter, as AIP was trying to turn the idea of "kick fighting" into a phenomenon. It's a shame it didn't work, because I would have loved a 2020s Kick Fighting reboot movie in an attempt to create a new franchise to compete with modern comic book movies. This is now the seventh AIP film on the site, which still has them well behind Cannon, PM, and The Asylum as far as DTV movie houses go. For a while, a lot of their catalog was on Prime, but I didn't get around to them, and by the time I did, Prime dumped them all. Classic Prime, trying to out Netflix Netflix.
Finally, the end credits tell us that Benny Urquidez was undefeated as a professional fighter, just in case we thought maybe he wasn't that great after he lost a scripted cinematic fight to Richard Norton, who was also playing a character. I guess if you're Benny Urquidez or anyone else who fought for a living, it matters to you who you can take and who you can't take in a fight--and maybe Urquidez didn't even ask for that credit in the film--, but for me, I couldn't care less. When I see a fight scene in a film between two great fighters, for me it's about the art of them staging the fight for us that counts. On that score, I think Norton and Urquidez had a pretty good final battle, one that they both can be proud of, and I don't think any less of Urquidez as a fighter because his character ultimately lost.
And with that, let's wrap this up. As of this writing, you can catch this on YouTube. Tubi should have the entire AIP catalog by now, but since they don't, YouTube is a pretty good bet. And again, if you haven't yet, you need to check out the Comeuppance Reviews podcast. I get it on iTunes, but it's on your other favorite podcatchers as well.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093022
And if you haven't yet, check out my novel, Chad in Accounting, in paperback or on Kindle!
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