BOXING + MOVIE = KNOCK OUT. Raging Bull and the Rocky franchise are the heavyweight champions on which this formula is based. And the success of more recent contenders such as Million Dollar Baby illustrates the boxing movie’s still extant potential. The struggle to overcome all obstacles, to become the best - in the world, no less - naturally lends itself well to film. The fight itself, meanwhile, is a wondrous gift to cinema.

In The Fighter, director David O. Russell certainly packs a punch: the film’s fight sequences in particular are as powerful as we have seen on the big screen. But The Fighter falls down somewhat when the action strays from the ring, which in fact is most of its duration. The film’s focus on the personal relationships of real life ex-world welter weight champion, Micky Ward, is no bad thing in itself, if ground previously trod by Scorsese and De Niro. There is, however, an uneasy juxtaposition of naturalism and heavy handedness. This is reflected in Mark Wahlberg’s incredibly understated portrayal of Micky, alongside a lurid Christian Bale, as his half-brother and trainer, Dicky. Throughout it feels almost as if Wahlberg and Bale should be in different versions of the same film: Wahlberg the social-realist drama, Bale the garish tragicomedy. But when a documentary being made about Dicky is revealed not to be about his own boxing comeback, as he tells his mother, but instead his addiction to crack cocaine, the sense that Dicky’s whole life is but a performance justifies what initially seems like Bale’s excesses as an actor.

What really jars in The Fighter, though, is the discrepancy between the realism of the fight sequences, which become more prominent in the film’s second half, and the soap-opera-like scenes involving the caricatured gang of Micky and Dicky’s mother and numerous sisters. Many of the film’s lesser characters and even its extras detract from the intensity to which Russell aspires. Unfortunately The Fighter also fails to capitalise on that great staple of the boxing movie, the training montage. Russell, no doubt aiming for something subtler than the likes of Rocky, chooses instead a couple of mellower sequences, the first of which features Wahlberg spending more time with his stress-ball than his punchbag.

Such issues die down and the momentum is quickly recovered towards the film’s conclusion, in which Micky’s boxing career retakes the focus from the mid-narrative’s diversion to Dicky’s drug addiction. But given the film’s name, Wahlberg’s laconic (and at times almost dull) Micky is unable to fully convey his struggle to transcend the limits of his relationships.