As I am not a fan of raunchy comedy it should surprise no one that a raunchy comedy like Fist Fight is painful for me.  I simply don’t understand the appeal of stupid comedy; that is, comedy of people being stupid.  To me cleverness and wit is so much better than penis jokes and bullying and drug jokes and constant profanity.  I hated much of this film — but not all of it.

Richie Keen’s film is set at a terrible high school on the last day of the year.  Students run rampant and teachers don’t even try to control things — except for Stickland (Ice Cube) and Andy Campbell (Charlie Day).  Though completely opposite in their approaches, they honestly try to educate their charges.  Naturally they clash until pitted against each other in the title bout, to be fought after school.  It’s an intriguing concept for a comedy, one which I found (believe it or not) clever and promising.

The film suffers from two things — its overwhelming raunchiness (which some people evidently like) and no one for which to root. I like both Charlie Day and Ice Cube as performers, and they’re pretty good here, especially later in the story.  But they are caricatures more than characters.  And everyone else around them is utterly deplorable, especially the students, for which vandalism, blackmail and criminality are completely ordinary.  Some of the adults are merely buffoonish (Tracy Morgan, Dean Norris, Dennis Haysbert) while others are just creepy (Jillian Bell, Christina Hendricks).  Until the moments when cowardly Campbell finally stands up for himself, first against the school board, then Strickland, the film is pretty worthless.  Of course, the journey Campbell takes from zero to hero is the film’s dramatic arc, but it is muddled and stupid for way too much of the film’s running time.

Then I found one scene perfectly appalling, when Campbell’s young daughter does an R-rated variety show performance at school.  I cringed.  Only the ending of the story worked for me, as the publicity garnered by the teacher fight actually leads to change and unity.  There is a lot of truth to this story, buried beneath the profanity and bullying.  But for better, more worthwhile versions of how bad schools can get, go see Teachers (1984) or Lean on Me (1989) or Won’t Back Down (2012).  Crude comedies like this or Bad Teacher give movies about schools and educators a bad name.  ☆ 1/2.  10 March 2017.