The inspirational sports movie isn’t a genre that I usually
find very engaging. You normally don’t get too far removed from the underdog
triumphing over the evil, longtime champion storyline, and consequently most of
them are pretty cookie cutter and boring. Warrior
manages to turn the genre on its head a bit by pitting two underdogs
against each other and having them share equal billing as the main character.
With that simple touch, suddenly it becomes a movie worth paying attention to. And
once it’s got your attention, it keeps it by telling a compelling story about
the travails of a working class family. As a sports story Warrior is largely uninspired and even ridiculous in it’s plotting,
but as a drama about fathers and sons, I found it to be pretty successful. And
that lifts up the fighting section of the film as well.
Serving as our main characters are two brothers and their
alcoholic father. Tommy (Tom Hardy) left the other men at an early age, watched
his mother die, went off to war, and returns home with a great big chip on his
shoulder. Brendan (Joel Edgerton) found love early, and now is a high school
teacher and a family man, albeit one who is experiencing some serious money
troubles. Paddy (Nick Nolte) is the father, a recovering alcoholic whose
addiction must have been pretty bad, because neither of his sons are willing to
even entertain the notion of letting him back into their lives. That is, until
their situations get desperate. Both of the brothers need to get their hands on
some money fast, Brendan so he can keep his house, Tommy so he can take care of
a dead comrade’s family, and circumstances lead them both to entering a big
purse, mixed martial arts tournament in pursuit of the payoff. Seeing as Paddy
was once upon a time a great trainer of fighters, he manages to get entangled
in the situation as well. And so we have our sports story framework, which more
than anything else works as an excuse for the three men to get together and
interact. Despite the tired clichés of sports films, that means we get dialogue
being traded by three powerful actors in Hardy, Edgerton, and Nolte; and more
often than not that’s a very good thing.
Tom Hardy’s career is on a rocket ship right now, and with
good reason. This guy has an innate charisma that just bleeds off of the
screen, and apart from being a good actor he has that indefinable quality it
takes to become a huge movie star as well. Here he brings a lot of the bull in
a china shop energy and danger that he turned so many heads with in Bronson, and I’m sure that his tough guy
act is going to turn even more heads now that it’s being displayed in a
mainstream Hollywood film. Nolte is Nolte. He’s been around long enough that
you know what to expect from him by now. Here he gets a role with more
substance than anything I’ve seen him given in a long time though, and I
enjoyed the opportunity to see that the old man still has it in him. He does
get one really big scene that feels like it’s playing for a clip at the Oscars,
and in a movie full of performances that are subtler than that it stood out as
looking pretty inappropriate; but I don’t blame Nolte. Clearly he was directed
to go big and he delivered the scene as well as could be imagined, I just
thought that tonally the content of the scene didn’t jibe with everything else
around it. The surprise of the film is probably Edgerton as Brendan. He’s an
actor who I enjoyed in last year’s excellent Australian crime film Animal Kingdom, but nothing in that film
made me confident that he could stand next to huge screen presences like Hardy
and Nolte without getting dwarfed. Here he proves that he can more than hold
his own against such a tidal wave of charisma, even while playing the relative
straight man of the film. From here on out Edgerton will be one to watch.
Aside from the performances, the other thing the movie does
right is character building. We spend the whole first act just getting to know
the two brothers, and they are both interesting enough that they could have
anchored their own films. But when you tell their stories as parallels, and you
build them as being on a collision course with one another, they manage to feed
off of each other and become even more interesting in the process. And the film
goes the smart route of never making either a real underdog, or either a real
hero or villain. There are legitimate reasons to root for either to win the
tournament, and they both have unique strengths and weaknesses that could lead
to them succeeding or failing, so the film takes on more of a complexity than
the typical good guy vs. bad guy sports drama. It’s a given from the very
beginning of the movie that Tommy and Brendan are going to be the two men who
make it to the end of the tournament, so it had to be a bit of a trick to not
make the journey there seem like time wasted or a bore. By letting you get to
know each brother so well, Warrior does
that, and consequently it succeeds as a film. By the time Tommy and Brendan
come face to face in the beginning of the third act, you know them so well that
it feels like DeNiro and Pacino finally coming face to face in that diner scene
in Heat. That’s kind of an impressive
feat.
What didn’t work out so great was the logistics of the
sporting event they’re taking part in. We spend a lot of time setting up the
particulars of the MMA tournament that they’re fighting in, the Sparta
tournament, and to me it all felt like time wasted. We meet the entrepreneur
who is putting up the money and acting as the promoter, we get a rundown of the
history of the sport and why a Grand Prix style tournament happening in the
United States is such a big deal, and additionally it feels like we get a lot
of shameless self promotion for the sport of MMA in general. It felt like
advertising, and in a film that is a good chunk over two hours, I didn’t need
it. All I needed to know is that there was a tournament with a big money purse,
which could have taken thirty seconds to establish. Then the entire third act
is taken over by the TV broadcast of the tournament. Suddenly we’re getting
constant, annoying sports announcer banter acting as our narration and guiding
us through the action of the tournament. I would have rather spent that time in
the locker rooms with the brothers, the broadcast and hoopla of the event
playing out in the background. I don’t know why these fight films always have
to show us the matches through the framework of a real looking sports
broadcast. Just keep telling the story like you were for the first two-thirds
of the movie. It will be fine. I promise.
And the more it tells us about the logistics of the MMA
world, the more the places the film takes liberties with MMA rules for dramatic
purposes start to look ridiculous. When you’re trying so hard to set this up as
a real life MMA event, suddenly I’m wondering how a couple of nobodies without
any high profile fights could end up in the same tournament as a Fedor stand in
named Koba (Kurt Angle). Suddenly I’m wondering why a referee is allowing a
fight to continue when one of the fighters is obviously injured. Why one of our
main characters has seemed to only train in wrestling, with no striking or
submission work in his regiment or on his resume whatsoever. The fights
themselves are choreographed pretty well; they’re a nice mix of being dramatic
and fun to watch, but still sticking to the real technique of the sport. But I
think that the film would have been better served focusing even more on the personal
journeys of the brothers and less on the particulars of the sport of MMA.
Despite that, the performances are good, the characters are relatable, and
structurally this thing is tight as a drum. Everything leads up to that final
fight, and every question the film raises gets answered by which brother is
going to win. You couldn’t possibly be more invested in that fight by the time
it gets underway, and that’s the sign of a good sports movie.
