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There's something weird going on in Fighting, the new bare-knuckle street saga starring Channing Tatum as a kid from the sticks who comes to New York and gets roped into the illegal world of high-money street fighting under the tutelage of mumble-mouthed mentor Terrence Howard. It's not just Fighting's structure that makes it weird — although, as Tatum goes from fight to fight, each with a cartoon-ethnic backdrop (Brooklyn's packed with Russians, the Bronx swarms with Latinos, Chinatown … well, it is called Chinatown), you do feel less like you're watching a movie and more like you're watching someone play a racially insensitive violent videogame. The weirdest thing about Fighting is how it seems to be fighting itself, as if there were a much longer movie left on the cutting room floor — one that explained who these characters were, and what they wanted, and why they wanted it — that had been punched and kicked until it lost a lot of blood and shrank down to the slight, slick exploitation film Fighting winds up being.

Take, for example, the scenes where Howard and Tatum shoot the breeze. Tatum isn't a great actor — he's as wide as a barn door and about as expressive — but his scenes with Howard have a nice relaxed feel to them, as the two men feud over who's going to sleep where and why Tatum has to close his eyes before Howard pulls cash from his hidden stash. With Howard doing an almost pure riff on Dustin Hoffman's Ratso Rizzo from Midnight Cowboy — another tale of a small-town boy who came to New York to make a fortune off of what he was good at, albeit in a very different arena — those scenes have a relaxed, inarticulate poetry to them. But then Tatum has to go fight someone, or romance single mom Zulay (played by Zulay Henao — when you and your character have the same name, that's never a good indicator of your acting skills), or rage against the long-past, undiscussed falling out with his wrestling coach dad that made him a warrior.

But fighting is what we're being sold, and fighting is what we get. Thing is, there's not really great fighting in Fighting — director Dito Montiel is way more comfortable shooting conversations than fisticuffs, and the fight scenes are shot way too close and cut way too fast to really get any sense of what's going on. I know it sounds like I'm picking death by decapitation over death by fire ants — and in a certain way, I am — but I actually liked last year's Never Back Down more than Fighting, in that the fights were better-shot and, in Never Back Down, the conversations were filmed like outtakes from Friday Night Lights –a weird mix of adrenaline and earnestness that somehow stood out. Fighting doesn't have anything that good — although Roger Guenveur Smith does a demented Walken-esque performance that's almost notably quotable. (Before the final bout, he howls "In the words … of that late … great … American poet Marvin Gaye … Let's! Get! It! On!" This made me laugh like an idiot as I watched the film, which turned to mortification after realizing that, yes, at my L.A. press screening, Smith was sitting behind me. Oops.)

But there's not enough flavor, and the low dose of funk injected by the retro soundtrack choices can't overcome the films' flaws. Why is Tatum's character fighting, exactly? What brought him to New York? Does he lack any other skills, training or capabilities that would put him on a career path other than beating up ethnic stereotypes? What's the deal with Howard's disgraced hustler, anyhow? And why does the finale — which clearly sets up Fighting 2: Electric Boogaloo, or whatever they wind up calling it — feel like such a tacked-on chore? Fighting's not horrible — it'll make a certain strata of young men very happy, and heaven knows they could watch worse films to satisfy their action jones — but I just wish the filmmakers had won the battle of figuring out what kind of film they wanted to make before they started shooting and not after they started editing.