Warrior (DVD/Blu-Ray) - Dir. Gavin O'Connor. Starring Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton, Nick Nolte.
Fight movie that walks the line between a cheesy drama and a classy sports film.
Gruff Marine Tommy Conlon (Tom Hardy) enlists the help of his abusive ex-alcoholic father (Nick Nolte) to train him for an exclusive mixed martial arts tournament. It turns out that Brendan (Joel Edgerton), the estranged brother Tommy has never forgiven, is entered in the same competition.
Warrior is a strange hybrid of high and low aspirations. Performances are extremely good all around (particularly from Nolte). There is enough meat to the relationships between the three main characters to drive a meaningful drama. There are no villains to be found except a few skeletons in the closet. The fight scenes are shot in the ragged, no-nonsense style of a documentary or a sportscast; you'll find no gratuitous slow motion here.
And yet so many of Warrior's other pieces come from the handbook of a simple sports action movie. The most tedious of these are the snow-white personalities of the Conlon brothers, who the director is afraid to give any character flaws worse than a bad attitude. Brendan is a sickeningly wholesome high school physics teacher who just wants to keep a roof over his family's head. Tommy is a war hero who has vowed to donate his prize money to the widow of his dead buddy. These two and their entire plot arcs could have been lifted straight out of a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie.
And, short of having one of the brothers team up with Dennis Rodman to fight terrorists, the plot of Warrior couldn't get much more absurd. Brendan appears to be about half the size of the other fighters, not to mention ten years older and three times as hairy. But apparently a bit of motivation is all it takes to propel him from a bottom-rung UFC punching bag to a world-class competitor: he's late on his mortgage, and too stubborn to declare bankruptcy. The silliness of it all clashes with the film's otherwise quite successful attempts at coming off gritty and realistic.
Its serious side make it tempting to compare Warrior to another recent film also featuring two brothers, a martial arts championship, and a really generic title: David O. Russell's The Fighter, which earned acclaim last year for briefly making us believe that Mark Wahlberg has a soul. But that wouldn't be fair. Though Warrior walks the genre tightrope, in the end it commits to being a simple story of sports heroics; it should be praised for its lofty ambitions as a member of that category, not dismissed for its shortcomings as a drama. The plot is predictable, but gives us exactly what we want to see. The music is manipulative, but some of the finest manipulation you'll hear in a movie all year. The melodrama is unrelenting, but heartfelt.
Warrior occupies a different space than The Fighter and occupies it just as well.
Rated PG-13 for sibling rivalry.
4 out of 5
