The Movie: Girlfight, to me, was an alright movie. The first half of it seemed slow, and read like an R rated version of an after school special, but the last half really picked up the pace and drew me in.

This story is about a high school student named Diana (played by Michelle Rodriguez in her feature film debut) who lives a troubled life. She doesn't do well in school, and she has a hard time controlling her temper and gets into lots of fights... which is so out of hand that she's on the verge of being expelled. She's poor, she's a minority, and she's got few prospects and hopes. She's constantly at odds with her abusive dad, either over the death of her mother, or over his constant squelching of both her, and her brother's dreams. Boring! *yawn*.

But then she discovers boxing. See, her brother was learning to box cuz he was this wimpy gay-ish geekboy and his dad was afraid he was gonna get beat up. One day she comes and picks him up from the gym, and she gets an interest in boxing. She tries to get this one dude who looks and sounds like Joe Mantegna but isn't, to train her, but he is reluctant. "Girls can't box" he says. But eventually he takes her in, she picks up boxing real quick, and she kicks some ass. Also she falls in love with some other boxer somewhere along the way.

Basically, the first part where we get all the exposition about her personality and home life pretty much bored the hell out of me, and Michelle Rodriguez' mostly monotone delivery didn't help matters much. But once the boxing started happening, her struggle to train, to become recognized, and to even be allowed to box against guys was a much more compelling story.

So yeah. This wasn't the greatest movie in the world, but it wasn't the worst either, and if you're into girl power and overcoming all odds Lifetime movie of the week type movies, you'll probably like this one a lot.

The DVD: This is a dual sided disc with an anamorphic widescreen version on one side, and an unmatted, full frame 4:3 version on the other. As is common with these dual sided discs, there are some heavy compression artifacts from the lower data rate, and they manifest themselves with stepped (or some people call them "banded") gradients, especially on shots where there is a solid colored background. But, that being said, the color was nice and bold, and the contrast was pretty darned good. The image is a bit grainy, but really, that's just the grain of the original film you're seeing there.

Audio was in 5.1 surround, but the rear channels didn't get much of a workout during this movie. Nothing really to write home about here. And as far as the features go, you do get a director's commentary track, and a theatrical trailer (along with the trailers of two other movies), and some text based stuff like cast/crew bios, but that's pretty much it.