The Fighter vs. Warrior

   It's sort of fun to go back and watch movies that you've seen before to see if they still hold up.  It's also fun to have a positive opinion of a movie, then see a new film that totally changes your opinion of the one you originally that was good.  That pretty much sums up my experiences with The Fighter and Warrior.  When I saw The Fighter, I didn't think it was great, but I thought it was really good.  I felt that the dramatic narrative was riveting enough to sustain the film until the fight scenes occurred.  I originally liked the performances of Mark Wahlberg, Christian Bale and Melissa Leo.  The fight scenes themselves seemed well done and were certainly accurate to the bouts in real life (you can see a lot of Micky Ward's fights on YouTube).   But then I saw Warrior and in it I found a film that totally changed my opinion of the previous one.  Warrior's story is more interesting to me, its fight scenes make The Fighter's look so Hollywood, the performances of Hardy, Edgerton and Nolte are way more believable than those in The Fighter.  I went back and watched the performances of the main three characters in The Fighter and it was like I was watching a totally different movie.  I was not buying what Wahlberg, Bale and Leo were selling.   And I don't think it has to do with one being a true story and one being a fictionalized drama - Warrior is just the better movie.  There is way more at stake for the fighters in Warrior than there is for the Ward/Ecklund family.  The suspense leading up to the final fight in Warrior had me really invested and now I notice that The Fighter doesn't have any of these same elements.  We never really get a good idea of how big a fight Ward had with Shea Neary, and what it meant for his career.
   I found this an interesting change - one that I don't recall happening to me very often.  It makes me wonder what other films I would dislike and be able to pick apart upon a rewatch.


(note: I just rewatched Moneyball and Midnight in Paris and loved them both more than I did the first time)