Avis Metacritic

What starts as a blandly divided documentary eventually finds its way to something inspiring, infuriating, and unbounded by old ideas.

Wisely focusing on four key cases, The Fight is a worthy attempt to document the ACLU’s seemingly endless struggle to challenge the many constitutional violations of the Trump administration.

While lawyers read, in one montage, from their mountains of hate mail, there’s not a lot of balance to the film, aside from snippets of Fox News opinionators praising this or that Trump extra-legal executive fiat.

America is so punch-drunk that The Fight often feels like it’s whacking old bruises. But that is the national psyche’s problem more than the filmmakers’. For their part, they have made a worthwhile record of the civil rights advocates combating the country’s backslide into stripping away rights for voters, immigrants, pregnant women and the LGBTQ community.

The Fight is a fantastic documentary highlighting the real heroes out there: the overworked attornies of the ACLU.

The film is more of a curiosity, preaching to the already converted.

It takes us beyond the nuts and bolts we all heard while watching these battles unfold via the twenty-four news cycle and into the nuanced day-to-day struggles of the men and women working around the clock to curtail federal government overreach. This is the story of unrelenting, heroic lawyers.

The film justly draws attention to the perpetual work that must go into preserving democratic institutions.

It’s both interesting and sometimes a little dull, which seems to be by design.

Steinberg, Kriegman and Despres get the balance right between the legal heroes and their collaborators, the marginalized groups they are fighting to protect.