So, what exactly is Fist Fight about? Well, remember the episode of SpongeBob SquarePants entitled The Bully, in which new student Flats says that he's gonna kick SpongeBob's butt, which leads SpongeBob to go into a panic over the impending fatal butt-kicking he's gonna receive? Well, Fist Fight takes that premise of that 11-minute long cartoon and tries to stretch it to a movie that's just under 90 minutes long before the outtakes-enhanced credits begin to roll. The person whose gonna get their butt kicked in this scenario is wimpy English teacher Andy Campbell (Charlie Day), whose gotten fellow teacher Ron Strickland (Ice Cube) fired.
Ron challenges Andy to a fight after school at 3 o'clock sharp, which Andy tries multiple ways to get out of with the help of some zany other teachers who work at the school and it's the last day of school too so a bunch of Senior pranks are going on and....heavens to Betsy, even just getting the premise of this movie down on paper makes it so apparent what a patchwork of a script this movie has, a one-sentence concept (teachers with contrasting personalities fight) littered with blatantly unfunny scenarios that mostly consist of F-bombs being dropped and a whole bunch of yelling. All of these antics don't seem to exist because someone found them particularly funny, but rather they're here to eat up more and more screentime.
How else to explain the presence of other faculty members at the school Andy and Ron work at that have no bearing on the plot and are just sort of around to not only eat up minutes in the running time but also to add big names on the poster? The likes of Christina Hendricks and Kumail Nanjiani just show up for a bit and then vanish into the ether, with a large chunk of their screentime consisting of them in medium shots where they're reacting to characters or events just off-screen, making it apparent these actors showed up for a day or two, filmed their scenes individually and then they sloppily edited them into the final cut of the picture.
Now, this is not to say no film in history has ever done such a tactic, but the characters are so extraneous, so much talent is going to waste and they're incorporated into the movie in such a slapdash manner, that it just stuck out to me as a prime example of how amateurish this whole production is. Fist Fight also seems to be channeling the "Everyone is crazy and insane and selfish" aesthetic of Charlie Day's TV show It's Aways Sunny In Philadelphia, but with humor that's nowhere near as sharp as the gags seen on that FX program and it also tries to shoehorn schmaltzy sentimentality (are you surprised to learn that Andy Campbell is performing a talent show routine with his young daughter that he just can't miss?) into the heavily R-rated antics, which doesn't work at all.
Above all else, nothing in this movie (save for one line from Jillian Bell) is funny, it's the typical barrage of profanity, on-screen depictions of male genitalia and drugs jokes devoid of any humorous set-up, context or execution that are so easy to find in bottom of the barrel American comedies. Hell, the script itself is so sloppily put together that an entire plot point is triggered solely by Ice Cube delivering an overly obvious reference to an N.W.A. song (you get three guesses to figure out which tune it is and the first two guesses don't count). Remember that specific 1988 hit rap song they reference? That's a thing you know! Who needs actual humor when we can just name-drop actual songs! Fist Fight is basically just a flat-out disaster that cruelly wastes the time and energy of talented comedic performers. Just stay at home and watch that classic episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, The Bully, instead, because I can assure you that nothing in Fist Fight is even one-millionth as funny as this sole bit from that episode:
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