Antwone Fisher | Review

Directorial debut follows in the footsteps of Hollywood’s obnoxious story methods.

Somehow if this picture would premiere in April, it wouldn’t have the same affect, as it has now. Denzel Washington’s helms this sugar coated film just in time for the holidays about Antwone Fisher, who wrote a script about himself and which happens to be title of the film.

The story of Fisher (Derek Luke-Biker Boyz) begins with fist fights on a plenty for the naval base. As punishment we get the straight out of the movie book Good Will Hunting treatment, where the sailor gets a good hear-full from the navy shrink (Denzel Washington-Training Day) who is great at helping everyone else, except for his own situation with his wife-(a subplot that is all but significant to the rest of the film). After a couple of numb less charades between the husband without a child and a son without a father, the wings of the troubled adult from Cleveland are spread out and the healing process begins.

Luke portrays a character which will genuinely make you want to smile, while at other times his actions will make you want to puke-see the poem reading scene and his first Thanksgiving dinner for an example. I truly disliked how Washington continually went along with this pyramid story structure which shows Fisher with a problem and then shows why he has the problem and then displays how it looks like when it is resolved only to restart the whole process again. When he has problems with women we are transported to one abuse, when he has feelings of abandonment we go directly to the day his friend makes a wrong choice in a corner store. Perhaps they could have chosen to focus on his childhood with the portrayal of his youth with the great casting of the child actor. Overcoming sexual, physical and mental of abuse with the additional fact that he never had a father and was abandoned by his mother is a tragic story, but under the typical Hollywood treatment this becomes an over the top triumphant story-I’m not saying that we need to see the guy hit the bottle, but I think I would have appreciated an film story that would have included the interesting story that saw him pass out his script of his life to studio execs at the Sony lot in place of seeing him in America’s proud uniform until the film’s end. Save the sentimentality and the piano notes for others, this could have used a lot more bite and more of a creative edge to truly strike a cord within.

Washington’s film is not entirely horrible, there are some genuine put-a-smile-on-the-viewer’s-face moments and if film critic Roger Ebert declares that he “cried”-then you know that there are some heart-felt moments here. Either the film could have been more powerful if Washington would have shown the demoralizing effect it had on him or if it would show but he managed to survive but not without keeping wounds. This film will work with those mature audiences who see about 5 movies per year-two of which are during the X-Mas holidays, but for regular audiences Antwone Fisher is a major turn off simply for the way it takes this incredible survivor story and how it makes into this blind richly uplifting fairy-tale.

Rating 1 stars