Let’s get this out of the way: Warrior is not going to win the Oscar for best picture. I’m not even sure it’s going to be nominated for best picture, or director, or any meaningful category besides best actor and best supporting actor. It’s standing at an 84% Rotten Tomatoes ranking, and sports columnists have been praising the film as THE mixed martial arts movie. However, it’s not hard to be the best modern MMA movie, since most are low budget fare that no one has ever heard of or seen. I didn’t see Never Back Down, and I don’t think I ever want to, and Redbelt, one of my favorite movies made in the last 10 years, grossed only $2 million on a $7 million budget. So far, Warrior has surpassed that total for a gross of nearly $7 million, with a budget of $30 million, for a loss (so far) of almost 5 times that of Redbelt ($23 million vs. $5 million). Compare that with the movie most similar to Warrior in content, The Fighter, and the stats don’t measure up. The Fighter brought in $129 million world-wide ($129 million!!) on an even lower budget ($25 million), and more than double what Warrior made on its opening weekend. To be fair, The Fighter had a well-known cast of established actors, but what I think stands out the most is that people aren’t willing to accept MMA into the mainstream yet as much as they’re willing to watch a boxing event (a problem, with an imminent solution, detailed in my previous blog). However, though the film has yet to reach box-office success (which is may never do at this point) nor is it the masterpiece critics are claiming it to be, it can’t be called a failure by any means, and it definitely helps to have actors like Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton backing you up.
The film itself is completely predictable (not necessarily a bad thing, and the trailer kind of ruins the ending anyway) and contains its fair share of cheese. While Redbelt showed the sublties of training as a martial artist, and truly explored values like honour and trust, Warrior is a straight-forward rise-from-the-ashes-to-become-the-greatest movie with a bit of family issues thrown in. Tommy Conland (Tom Hardy) and Brendan Conlan (Joel Edgerton) are brothers, having grown up from a similarly troubled family life at home with their abusive alcoholic father, who, out of necessity, begin training to fight in mixed martial arts competitions. Eventually, both are picked to fight in the supposed biggest middleweight MMA tournament, named Sparta (oof, whoever named that one ought to be fired), and each must his way to the final. In between, Tommy meets up with his estranged father (Nick Nolte),having recovered from alcoholism for 1000 days without touching a bottle, who helps train him to fight again. That’s pretty much the sum of the story. I don’t really need to tell you where it goes, and you’ll have an idea 30 minutes in of what happens in the end. As I said, it’s not as complex a movie as some critics are making it out to be.
Those same critics are right about one thing though: the acting in this movie is amazing. I’ve never payed attention to anything Joel Edgerton or Tom Hardy have acted in in the past, but I will now. Both are revelations here, and they make you forget all about the over-the-top cornball moments that happen throughout the films. Brendan’s wife (Jennifer Morrison) is an annoying presence to say the least, especially when cheering her husband following scene after scene of her disapproving of his MMA fascination, and the subplot featuring the students he teaches and the principal he teaches for is utterly useless. As such, Edgerton’s character doesn’t have much to play off of, but he sure delivers despite all the mess going on around him, and hits every note of a desperate working class father perfectly. Tommy is the opposite, all bottled up inside rage, spiteful of everyone around him and begrudgingly opening up only when things are at their worst. His scenes with his father are by far the best of the movie, though they’re few and far between. It says a lot that those few scenes might actually get both actors nominations at the Oscars, and it’s a shame the movie didn’t focus entirely on both characters, because if it did, this movie could’ve even surpassed The Fighter in terms of sheer emotional resonance. I’m assuming the writers wanted to focus more on bringing MMA to the forefront, and they did make each fight believable and suspenseful, but somewhere along the way they went overboard and lost the entire meaning of what the movie was supposed to be about. As a movie about a father and his two sons reconciling their differences and forgiving each other, it works like no other. Unfortunately, MMA should have remained a spectator, and not gotten inside the ring with them.
