Chick Fight Parent Guide

Things have been going pretty poorly for Anna (Malin Akerman) lately – her mother Mary (Julie Michaels) is dead, her father Ed (Kevin Nash) has started seeing a man named Chuck (Alec Mapa), and her uninsured busines just burned to the ground. Her friend, Charleen (Dulce Sloan) knows what she needs: a visit to a secret underground fight club started by Anna’s mother. The only problem is that Anna doesn’t know how to fight, and she’s just unwittingly challenged Olivia (Bella Thorne), the club’s undefeated champion. Now she’ll have to learn and learn fast…

This is more Karate Kid than Fight Club, with Anna taking Sly Stallone’s place as an enthusiastic amateur with minimal training and a remarkably durable skull. It’s one of those “it’s not the size dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog” type movies. The sort of vaguely empowering “you too can overcome your obstacles” movie, where the only cost for fighting your personal demons is a criminal record and a couple of concussions.

Speaking of which, a concussion would probably make this movie a lot more fun. The dialogue is very, very stale. The can the screenwriter pulled it out of has been open since the mid-90s, and the contents are so blandly familiar you could probably write a similar movie with a computer algorithm. Worse, Chick Fight is another comedy that forgot to be funny at any point in the run-time. It’s a passable action flick, but unless you think explicit sexual references are hysterical, there are no actual jokes. And I’m not saying that there are just dirty jokes – there aren’t. Just references. It’s like a third-grader laughing at the word “butt”.

I’ve certainly had worse times watching movies in this job, but this has to count as one of the blander films I’ve seen. Even the fighting is boring, which takes some work. I think the kindest thing I can say for this film is that it doesn’t turn into bikini-wrestling, which did genuinely surprise me. The fighters wear pretty standard female workout clothes, meaning sports bras, tank tops, and leggings. The advantage of this, other than not making me feel like a creep for watching 90 minutes of bikini wrestling, is that it actually makes the characters feel more authentic. Chick Fight isn’t good by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s bad in different ways than I expected. At this point, I’ll take it.