Although “Fist Fight” — a comedy about a beef between two feuding high school teachers — culminates in the promised slugfest, evidence would suggest that it’s the creators of this rope-a-dopey farce who took too many blows to the head.
The jokes (by screenwriters Van Robichaux and Evan Susser) have all the wit of a punch-drunk palooka. And the direction by Richie Keen (“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”) is a lead-footed affair. The slapsticky, sight-gag-heavy yukfest, which is filled with the kind of phallic humor you may have sniggered at when you were 16, floats like a dead butterfly, and stings like a B-movie.
The two pugilists in question are Mr. Campbell (Charlie Day), a whiny English teacher, and Mr. Strickland (Ice Cube), a no-nonsense history teacher who is a more unhinged version of “Lean on Me’s” baseball-bat-toting Joe Clark.
When Strickland loses his cool in front of his class, taking a fireman’s ax to a misbehaving student’s desk, Campbell rats on him to the principal (Dean Norris), leading to Strickland’s threat of an after-school showdown. Much of the film consists of Campbell’s ineffectual efforts to forestall the inevitable, in a grown-up evocation of the 1987 comedy “Three O’Clock High” (a far better film about a wuss trying to avoid a beatdown by a schoolyard bully).