Warrior | Review

Green-lit due to the success of last year’s The Fighter, Gavin O’Connor’s mixed martial arts sports drama Warrior sticks closer to the routine ‘Rocky’-derived movie formula, complete with blue-collar window dressing and even a “mighty mythical Russian” for the hero to overcome. Calling to mind the “Wallace Beery wrestling picture” Barton Fink couldn’t bring himself to write, ‘Warrior’ is too consistently beholden to sports movie cliché to be anything more than superficially entertaining. O’Connor’s best skill as a director is his casting: Brit Tom Hardy and Aussie Joel Edgerton are surprisingly passable as Tommy and Brendan Conlon, born-and-bred Pittsburgh brothers (one of the movie’s few original details is that it’s not set in Boston) who take out on each other the unresolved anger they feel towards their drunk Irish brute of a father, played by a beautifully mumbling Nick Nolte.

Straining sweatily for working class cred, the story finds Tommy and Brendan — one an Iraq war vet, the other a high school teacher — each forced back into the MMA “cage” because of the troubled economic times. They’re not after the $5 million winner-takes-all tournament purse out of greed or desire for fame — they’ve simply got mouths to feed, war buddies’ widows to take care of, and houses to keep out of foreclosure. Unsurprisingly, this blue-collar desperation is never more than fodder for the sports movie convention mill, as when at a crucial moment in a big match, one brother (along with the audience) is reminded by his coach of the dramatic stakes: “You don’t knock him out, you don’t have a home!”

The three fantastic lead actors all bring gravity and some genuinely behavioral moments to the proceedings, but in the end, like an MMA fighter pinned by his opponent to the canvas, they can’t escape the death grip of predictable plotting and wince-inducing expository dialogue. Hardy shows an exciting chameleon quality as an actor, believable as an inarticulate, good-hearted lug with hostility issues. Edgerton is instantly likable in a more traditionally sympathetic role, though his Renaissance-painting face and mournful eyes keep him slightly, almost mystically ajar from any contemporary setting. (Who can’t wait to see how Kathryn Bigelow uses him in her Bin Laden movie?)

As for Nick Nolte, you could make the argument that every time he isn’t in every frame of a movie he’s being under-used. He has the best scene in the film: Deeply drunk and half-insane, Nolte’s character spews out exclamatory passages from ‘Moby Dick.’ Sadly, this extraordinary phenomenon, which could easily captivate for hours on end, lasts here only a few seconds. That’s the problem with plot-driven movies — there’s never any time to stop and watch an inspired, red-faced lunatic furiously recite Melville in his bathrobe. Meanwhile, Jennifer Morrison (best known for the TV show ‘House’) plays Edgerton’s hot, fretting wife; she’s hot, and frets. Clearly, Olivia Wilde’s agent still isn’t taking Morrison’s calls.

Unlike with boxing or other sports whose rules and rhythms the audience would be generally familiar with, O’Connor & Co. have to deal with the problem of explaining the basics of MMA while simultaneously rousing the emotions. Their solution is to overlay the fight sequences with constant narration from whoever’s at hand to interpret things for the audience — the chatty, comic-relief broadcasters, the trainer shouting strategy tips to his fighter from outside the cage, etc. Seemingly every kick and punch the fighters throw is accompanied by an explanatory footnote. The relentlessness of this expository device becomes distracting, and also silly, as when the audience is informed, repeatedly, that one fighter has “pulled off a miracle!” This despite the fact that previously we were instructed that in the single-elimination MMA format, “anything can happen.”

Yet another tried-and-true inspirational sports movie tactic is commandeered by O’Connor for all it’s worth: using crowd reactions to coerce the audience’s own response to what’s going on. There are endless cutaways to the cheering arena fans, as well as the squealing, hollering friends & family watching back home on TV; each reaction shot is a pied piper note drawing the audience insidiously closer to a sham catharsis. Even if you fall for it, even if you want to, even if it’s fun, it’s still manipulation — it exploits and disrespects people’s openness to having a genuine, personal emotional experience at the movies. Not the worst crime in the world, but it still leaves you feeling dirty afterwards for having felt anything at all.

Rating 2 stars