MIGUEL WANTS TO FIGHT - Mark Reviews Movies

Miguel Wants to Fight, Hulu

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 15, 2023

Miguel Wants to Fight is about, well, a teenager named Miguel who wants to get into a fight. The story is mainly that simple, although it's complicated by the actual, underlying reasons of why our protagonist wants to fight and made kind of charming by the movie's pop-culturally aware characters.

It's brief and breezy, meaning that Jason Concepcion and Shea Serrano's screenplay doesn't have much time to stumble. That also means, though, that the movie doesn't care to examine the various ideas it so overtly presents. Since the material is primarily treated as a comedy, though, some concessions should be afforded to the filmmakers.

Our not-at-all-a-hero is played by Tyler Dean Flores, whose Miguel is a high school junior with a passion for anime and martial arts movies, a close group of friends, and a history of sitting it out whenever his three best pals get into scrapes at school and around the neighborhood. None of those friends has noticed Miguel sitting on the sidelines while they punch and get punched by someone who has insulted or done wrong to them in some way, until a pick-up basketball game turns violent. That's when David (Christian Vunipola), Cass (Imani Lewis), and Srini (Suraj Partha) notices that, after the brawl, Miguel doesn't have a scratch on him.

The whole premise, of course, relies on the idea that solving disagreements and arguments and conflict of any kind is only attainable through violence, and the movie, then, also relies on our tacit acceptance that such must be the case in this particularly tough and anonymous neighborhood. Again, most of this is played for laughs, so it's not as if one should expect some exploration of how and why the residents within these socioeconomic conditions arrive at that conclusion.

The acceptance of that as fact, though, still feels a little uncomfortable in our current climate, when teenage boys and young men in particular take that retaliatory philosophy to extremes. Every mass shooter probably grew up seeing, hearing, or learning that notion by some kind of example, and if bringing up such real-world violence while discussing the topic of a slightly goofy comedy seems excessive, that might be true. It doesn't make the movie's avoidance of exploring what it means to respond to any real or perceive slight with violence any less of a truth, either.

The tone here, established right away by director Oz Rodriguez, mostly keeps such thoughts at bay, at least. It is a bit silly, since Miguel is so obsessed with media that revolves around violence, has a father (played by Raúl Castillo) who trains boxers at a local gym, and hangs out three teens who see fighting as a normal part of getting through life.

Somehow, the teen has avoided throwing or being on the receiving end of a punch or kick for almost a dozen and a half years. There's a montage of how Miguel has accomplished that in the group's past clashes. A solid gag within that sequence has him locking eyes with a member of an opposing group of friends, the two of them recognizing that they're not into the idea of fighting, and both of them silently agreeing to just aggressively embrace and hope that no one else notices.

The plot and jokes are in rapid-fire mode, and while that ultimately sells the potential of this story and these characters short, it does mean that the humor—or, at least, the attempts at it—are practically non-stop. The script has the four friends make plenty of pop-culture references, as they bicker and banter their way toward helping Miguel prepare for his first fight. Some of it comes across as a stretch, as if teens are incapable of talking about anything but what they've seen on television or in the movies, or forcibly clever, although the group's attempts to come up with solid insults after the fighting is finished is a recognizable touch.

The same goes for Rodriguez's assorted scenes set within Miguel's imagination, which has the teenager seeing himself as a Bruce Lee character, the hero of a sci-fi series who's able to learn—as Miguel hopes he has been be to over the years—how to fight by way of a sort of osmosis, or the animated antihero who's capable of defeating a foe with a single blow. They're more references than an actual jokes, but the gimmick fit in here well enough.

Much funnier are Miguel's repeated failed attempts to actually pick a fight with someone, without making it seem as if he's the one starting the conflict. After all, Miguel sees himself as a basically decent guy, and basically decent guys don't go around fighting people for no reason. That belief in his inherent goodness comes into question later, since Miguel is actually trying to start a fight for selfish reasons, involving his family moving soon and his certainty that he's a disappointment to his dad. It doesn't diminish the gags of Miguel whispering insults or accidentally befriending a potential foe.

There's definitely some scrappy charm to Miguel Wants to Fight, mainly from its cast and the filmmakers' willingness to keep the jokes coming no matter what. At a quick 71 minutes (without credits), the movie doesn't overstay its welcome, but it also doesn't have the time or concern to do much of any substance with such loaded material.

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