DAY OF THE FIGHT - Mark Reviews Movies

Day of the Fight, Falling Forward Films

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | December 5, 2024

It is arguably the most important day in the life of Mike Flannigan (Michael C. Pitt), a boxer whose career and personal life have collapsed. As the title suggests, Day of the Fight follows the pugilist in the hours before his return to the sport, fighting an opponent who's not just favored to win. Everyone assumes the fight will finished quickly with Mike getting knocked out.

Boxing, though, is mostly an excuse for writer/director Jack Huston, the actor making his debut behind the camera, to pick apart what Mike has done with his life, who he is, and everything that made all of that happen. He spends the hours before the nighttime undercard bout on a mission to visit every important person to him, get advice, say what he should have said years or decades ago, and find some peace before facing the toughest challenge of his professional career.

Mike is also doing this because it could be his last, and we're not just talking about the match, either. After watching the guy exercise in his apartment, Huston inserts the first of multiple flashbacks that put a fine point on every scene that unfolds here. In it, a doctor tells Mike that the repeated blows to his head have caused many brain clots, including one inoperable aneurysm that gives the doctor pause. If it bursts, Mike will die, and it will almost certainly burst if, say, Mike has a boxing match against someone whom everyone believes will knock him out.

Everything that happens here is ostensibly covered in the pall of mortality. That's most obvious in the way Huston and cinematographer Peter Simonite shoot the majority of the movie in black-and-white (A few touches of color here and there or some flashbacks having the look of mostly washed-out color are so subtle as to not really register). It looks striking, to be sure, as Mike walks the streets, rides the subways, and visits some landmarks of New York City at some point in the 1980s. The man's re-living his life before it possibly ends, and the movie reflects that with its own sense of nostalgia for when a little, character-driven stories like this one were more prevalent.

There's very little boxing until the finale, when it arguably takes over too much, save for Mike's early training montage and a moment when he puts a bully fighter in his place at the gym where Mike learned the ropes. The guy's good, which we also know when characters explain he holds the record for the most wins by a single fighter (He's quick to point out he was knocked down plenty, too), but that doesn't matter in this situation, when one punch that lands the wrong way could kill him.

The movie isn't about the question of Mike's skill anyway. He's good, but the real question is if he is or could become a good man. Up until this point in his life, he's not entirely sure if that is, ever was, or even could be the case.

What this means for the story is a series of scenes of Mike talking to a number of people about himself, his past, the family he was born into, the one he made with a woman who no longer wants to speak to him, his many mistakes, and his efforts to atone for those. Admittedly, it's nice to see a movie that has so little concern for genre or gimmickry, instead trying to get at the heart and soul of a man who has had the former broken too many times for the latter not to be damaged, too.

Every visit with someone from Mike's life reveals a bit more about how all of that happened. Talking to his uncle (played by Steve Buscemi) who works down by the waterfront, Mike notes that he was 12 when his mother died unexpectedly, leaving him to wonder if he has lived up to the woman he remembers. Talking with his old boxing coach Stevie (Ron Perlman), Mike goes through his career and thanks the man for getting him this match, which comes with a lot of controversy on account of the biggest mistake of his life. Speaking with his close friend Patrick (John Magaro), he gets some advice from the pal, now a Catholic priest, about how to genuinely atone for that most obvious of sins from his past.

The pattern here becomes obvious and a bit routine pretty quickly, continuing with visits to a friendly bookie (played by Anatol Yusef) who guarantees to pay out almost half a million dollars on a bet if Mike wins, to his ex-wife Jessica (Nicolette Robinson) who agrees to hear him out, and to his father (played by Joe Pesci), who's now exists in an almost catatonic state in a nursing home. When the time of the fight comes, we almost forget it was supposed to happen, as well as what it could mean for Mike.

That's a positive in a way, because the movie's sincerity about its protagonist, played with genuine emotional and psychological anguish by Pitt, feels authentic. The man matters more than the match in Day of the Fight, but in trying to make that point repeatedly clear, the movie falls into its own kind of formulaic storytelling. It means well, but Huston isn't exactly subtle about either the approach or those intentions.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products