Warrior

Disclaimer:  Reviews contain my personal opinion, and I don't claim to be the authority on these things.  I appreciate and respect that other people may have different opinions.  Friendly debate is welcome, but name-calling and other such immaturity will be ignored.  My reviews assume you've either seen the movie already or aren't planning to.  They're full of spoilers, but they won't necessarily describe the whole movie beginning to end... more likely I'll rant about some aspect or another in detail, but leave huge gaps about the plot.  And oh yeah, I'll be cursing.



For my very first review I'll be tearing into - I mean analyzing - the movie Warrior.  I'm not talking about that 80s cult classic The Warriors, but the 2011 sports drama starring Nick Nolte and featuring UFC fighting. (Ultimate Fighting Championship, for those who don't know, is a Mixed Martial Arts league.. I'm pretty sure there's a reality show about it?). Weird combo, right?  I was TOTALLY clueless about the subject matter of this movie, so when it started off, I settled in for a lengthy drama about a fractured Irish family.  Suddenly, the jaded son is asking the ex-alcoholic father to train him for the UFC!  omg, fight movie, we're going to have some action!  Sudden cut to suburbia with the guy's *other* son, who's going to lose his house if he doesn't make a lot of money fast, and then *he's* training for the UFC!  So you pretty much know from the beginning these guys are going to end up fighting.  There's your basic plot.


If you like family dramas, or sports movies, or the UFC, you'll probably like this movie.  It was pretty decent.  Some things in it felt a little forced, or unlikely, but as my film teacher is always insisting, you can get by them with "the willing suspension of disbelief."  But I went into the movie with everyone saying "Oh, it's so good, it's so good!"  So the more I saw, the angrier I became with it.


First of all, it's got a lot going on.  In some respects, that's good.  It has something for everybody to be interested in.  But for me, it felt a lot more like it interrupted itself.  Just when the drama with the characters was getting interesting, BAM, horribly violent fight scene.  Not that I'm squeamish about violence, but it's a pretty jarring contrast.  I kept wanting to ask "Who got sports movie in my drama?" or "Who got drama in my sports movie?"


Secondly, as much as it wanted to be different, there were so many utterly cliche sports movie tropes in it!  It had a training montage, which it tried to make new and different by using a four-way split screen, but it was still a training montage.  And the fights leading up to the final fight all had the typical sports movie stuff - reaction shots of the people at home watching it on TV, generic music trying to build tension, the announcers making witty quips about the main characters being underdogs, etc.  It made me FURIOUS.


Finally, the movie relied heavily on Beethoven's 9th Symphony (you know, Ode to Joy).  I am SO TIRED of hearing that song in everything.  Don't get me wrong, I love it, but it is one of THE most overused songs in world cinema.  It's like putting "All Along the Watchtowers" in a Vietnam War era movie, or "Requiem for a Dream" in a movie trailer.  It just makes me groan.


So, now that I've ranted about what pissed me off, here's what I liked about it.  The acting was superb.  Both of the actors playing the brothers are covering accents, and you can't tell at all.  All the performances are very natural, and I found myself being drawn in to the human drama despite how mad I was at the movie.   The whole thing was also very well shot and well directed.  The movie balanced three main characters and maintained equal interest on all three, which is hard to do.  And the main thing that kept it from feeling like every sports movie ever was that there were *two* main characters in the sports event.  This forces you to pick a side, or creates great tension because you're not just rooting for one guy, you're conflicted over who you want to win.  It also does a great job of making MMA fighting look interesting; since most of the fighting involves grappling, which is not pretty to look at, that can be tough.


So, to sum up, I thought this movie was horrendously overrated.  It's still worth watching if you like sports, the UFC, or dramas about estranged families, but the hype pretty much killed it for me.