The Guardian has a perfect Genre Watch piece on the fight-movie, sports films and The Fighter. It takes the position that the only way to make a really good sports movie may be to avoid or downplay the conventions of the sports movie. He uses other films to support his argument, but can anyone think of any counter examples?
"The biggest loser in David O Russell's The Fighter is the fight-movie in particular, and the sports-movie genre in general. Usually when a sports movie kicks off, we can anticipate a harrowingly familiar structure defined by the passage of the season, from warm-ups and practice through qualifying heats - or, in this case, bouts - through the quarters and semis and the final itself, with a side-dish of triumph over adversity, moral or familial redemption, getting the girl and saving your soul. It's an iron-clad formula that makes sports movies similar to rock'n'roll biopics like Ray and Walk The Line – they have exactly the same plot and structure, and are often the same movie.
... Russell makes the necessary concessions to the demands of genre, and if you fail to shed a tear then you're made of stone – but they don't dominate his characters or their story, and the result is his best and most soulful movie since Three Kings.The best sports movies are the ones with the smallest amount of actual sport in them: This Sporting Life, where the action is all in pubs and bedrooms, with the rugby field an existential zone of combat; ditto Raging Bull, with its mere 18 minutes of epoch-making fight footage set against a convincing, lovingly detail-packed evocation of Italian-American, working-class family life in the 1940s and 50s. ...
Sporting Life – is what helps The Fighter escape the confines of genre and expectation. Without all that humming, bustling, foul-mouthed, real-life humanity, it might just have been another sports movie – another Gridiron Gang, another Any Given Sunday – instead of a new admission to the Pantheon of Great Sports Movies – for which one needs more than mere sport •
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