Entertainment

Bout as fun as a beating

Pity the boxing movie that thinks it can be both “Raging Bull” and “Rocky.”

“The Fighter” (did you stay up all night working on that title, fellas?) is the real-life welterweight Micky Ward (Mark Wahlberg), a product of disintegrating Lowell, Mass. He’s the younger half-brother of the washed-up and drugged-out Dicky Eklund (Christian Bale), a boxer himself who, in the 1980s, once floored Sugar Ray Leonard. Or maybe Sugar Ray tripped.

Now it’s the mid-1990s, and Micky’s career is being held back by the bad advice of Dicky, a roosterish crackhead, and his manager mother, Alice (Melissa Leo), a cawing shrew. Bale and Leo turn the movie into a white-trash Dumpster dive for lowlife looky-loos, full of scorn and mockery for these types but innocent of any subtlety or attempt to understand.

Every few scenes a horrific half-dozen of Micky’s freak-show sisters — all deep-fried hair and deep-cut leopard-print tops — sit shrieking in a row, but they serve no dramatic purpose. They’re simply the worst kind of running gag, planted to excite our sense of superiority like prize exhibits from the skank museum.

Leo and Bale give the kind of unbearably emphatic all-caps performances that are guaranteed to get Oscar nominations for best supporting caricatures. Any actor who played Bonnie Parker or Joseph Stalin with the kind of chomping frenzy Bale and Leo bring to every scene would be advised to tone things down a bit, but Hollywood is blind to hyperbole when it comes to the lunch-bucket class.

Bale even has a funny way of running — Ace Ventura meets Forrest Gump. Oh, and he has whittled his frame down to that of a cancerous scarecrow. By all means, give him an Oscar: Obviously, weight manipulation and artistry are the same thing.

It’s worth noting that no such histrionics are on offer from Wahlberg, who, unlike Leo, Bale and their director and unindicted co-conspirator David O. Russell (“Three Kings,” “Flirting With Disaster”), actually knows something about Boston-area blue collars. He turns in an honest and clearheaded performance as Bale capers and mugs, juking and jiving and diving out of windows. Wahlberg’s character feels like an actual person, and to the extent the movie sticks with him, it’s reasonably effective.

A bruised but restrained Amy Adams is believable as the girl, a tough little barmaid who encourages Micky to shed the influence of his mom and brother, though in the latter case Micky is aided by Dicky’s being jailed. Without this mini-crusade, her character wouldn’t have much to do, but as it is, she underlines the curious passivity of the central figure (tough guy can’t win a battle with his ma? Wasn’t this filmed before as “Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot”?).

Equally equivocal is the story, which can’t quite figure out what or whom it’s about. At one point, the movie wastes 10 minutes or so working out that Dicky accepts being fired as a coach. Then he goes right back to being Micky’s workout partner and even ringside helper during the big fight. If Dicky is fine when he’s off drugs, then the movie isn’t really even about feuding brothers. It simply tells us crack isn’t a great lifestyle choice.

For 10 minutes in the middle and 20 minutes at the end, the movie turns into a “Rocky” clone, with apologetically brief workout scenes that are a little too embarrassed by their conventionality to be rousing, and fight scenes shot exactly like the Italian Stallion’s. But if these parts, and Wahlberg’s restraint, do squeeze out some emotion, they still don’t cohere in a movie that’s mainly about its junkyard mise-en-scéne.

And what a miserable mise it is: Two-thirds of “The Fighter” is a slog through the bleak and the ugly — poverty porn meant to reassure us that our social inferiors never say anything witty or achieve a moment of grace. Still, they might provide intermittent entertainment by beating each other up.

kyle.smith@nypost.com