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Maybe a few of you saw Fighting over the weekend; I'd guess that most Cinematical readers chose to steer clear. I kind of liked the film, which is thin and silly but has a nice measured earnestness and is beautifully directed by Dito Montiel (A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints), a prodigy with a terrific sense of rhythm, motion and place. But the real reason I'd recommend Fighting to all of you is a completely deranged, unmissable performance by one Roger Guenveur Smith. Smith has bided his time over the past couple of decades in B-grade DTV efforts, small roles in Spike Lee films (he was Do the Right Thing's Smiley), and an occasional appearance in something higher-profile, like Ridley Scott's American Gangster. I hope that Fighting earns him some cult popularity and maybe some more interesting work.

He plays "Jack Dancing," a New York mobster and streetfighting kingpin who gives Channing Tatum's Shawn his first bout at the urging of hustling small-timer Harvey (Terrence Howard). He doesn't have a lot of screentime, but he takes the movie to a whole new, utterly bizarre level whenever he appears -- and in the process made me laugh harder than almost anything else this year. His performance has been described by others as "Walken-esque," but while Smith is compellingly weird in a similar way (and speaks with a comparable off-kilter cadence), he adds an element of hardass gangster menace that somehow makes the whole thing even funnier.

"I believe in fate," murmurs the soft-spoken Shawn MacArthur, by way of explaining how he was positive that he'd run into beautiful single mother / cocktail waitress Zulay so soon after a fleeting encounter in the most populated city in the United States. But he might as well have said, "I believe in movies in which every step of the narrative is telegraphed well in advance, every character is numbingly familiar, every choreographed brawl is edited into unwatchable confusion, and a feisty, tiny, Spanish-speaking mother steals the show."

As played by Channing Tatum in Fighting, a low-key potboiler directed by Dito Montiel (A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints), Shawn is a mysterious, brooding loner with downcast eyes that only light up when he's flailing away at an opponent with his hands, feet, or head. Shawn has somehow landed in New York City, evidently by fate, since we never learn why he headed to the Big Apple instead of, say, Cincinnati or Atlanta or Albuquerque.

Eventually, pieces of his back story emerge, but long before that happens, the two defining aspects of his personality are writ large: he's a nice guy with a wicked temper. One moment, he's politely holding an emergency gate open for an elderly lady in the subway and bemusedly indulging a long stream of cheats who quickly follow behind her. The next, he's flailing away at a gang of thieves intent on disrupting his fledgling street merchant "business" of selling scavenged items on a sidewalk.

The latter scene is where he catches the eye of two other characters who will, inevitably, become the most important people in his life: Terrence Howard as street hustler Harvey and Zulay Henao as Zulay, a woman trying to buy a children's book.

Click image below for full poster

Cinematical has just received this exclusive poster for Fighting, starring Channing Tatum and Terrence Howard. Directed by Dito Montiel (A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints), Fighting follows a young fighter/ticket scalper who's "discovered" and subsequently mentored by a smooth-talking trainer with eyes on making a whole lotta money on the underground fighting circuit. Kinda feels like Fight Club meets The Fast and the Furious, but with Montiel behind the camera, you're going to get a strong, gritty realness since he grew up on the streets of New York City (where the movie is set) and likes to inject a lot of his own experiences into his films. (And hey, you ladies get Channing Tatum without his shirt on for an hour and a half -- life ain't so bad after all, eh?)

Fighting hits theaters on April 24. Check out the full poster below and the trailer over on Moviefone.

As I mentioned before, Cinematical had a chance to visit the set of Dito Montiel's (A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints) new film, Fighting, last night, which was shooting on seventh avenue and 54th street here in New York City. We'll have a full set report for you in the coming weeks, but why not share with you a few nuggets of information now. I was on the set for about four hours before we finally got to speak to director Dito Montiel. After it began pouring out, they called lunch, and myself -- along with one other writer and Montiel -- ran across the street, ducked into a diner and sat down for some conversation over soup and a beer. We talked for a good half hour about Fighting, among all sorts of other things, but toward the end of our chat Montiel revealed that he will indeed adapt and direct his latest book, Eddie Krumble Is the Clapper, for the big screen.

For starters, Montiel will be leaving New York for the first time, and making this film elsewhere. Here's what he had to say about the film: "Yeah, I'm setting up to make that movie -- it's a whole different trip -- and it's in Los Angeles, so I get to sneak out there for a minute. It's called Eddie Krumble Is the Clapper, and it's about a guy who's a clapper for shows. They hire people to clap and laugh at bad jokes. It's a little different world; they get $35 a show." I asked Montiel if this was based on someone he knew, and he replied, "Yeah, my friend Eddie. Not Eddie Krumble -- I named him Eddie Krumble -- but my friend Eddie; he's from Long Island City and he moved out to Los Angeles. He gets thirty-five dollars a day, he does like three shows a day, and he sits in on whatever shows people don't go to. It's like extras, except it's a little bit below extras."

And does he have anyone in mind yet to play this clapper? How about Channing Tatum (who's working with Montiel for the second time on Fighting, after also starring in Saints)? When I brought up Tatum's name, Montiel laughed and said: "Hey, you never know. Channing would make a badass clapper -- he'd be the toughest clapper ever!"

I'm of two minds about A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, a new dramatic film written and directed by Dito Montiel and written from his own memoirs of growing up in Astoria, Queens during the mid-80s. Parts of it are engaging, thoughtful and affecting, from the first-rate cast (headlined by Robert Downey, Jr. and Shia LaBeouf as different ages of Montiel) to Montiel's skill in demonstrating through visuals and dialogue how what we're watching is not necessarily the past as it happened but as Dito remembers it. At the same time, it's hard to be too engaged by the adolescent struggles of Dito and his friends Nerf, Guiseppe, Mick and Antonio as they drift aimlessly through a humid swamp of testosterone and ignorance.

In the present day, Dito's a writer, living in Los Angeles, far from New York. But a call from his mother Flori (Dianne Wiest) imploring Dito to come home to see his ill father Monty (Chazz Palminteri) puts Dito on the next plane to New York … and onto the on-ramp for memory lane. Dito (played in the past by LaBeouf) is spending a sweltering summer in Queens hanging out with his pals. He has the possibility of pleasure in a romance with neighborhood girl Laurie (Melonie Diaz) and the possibility of danger as a local graffiti war heats up. …