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Tom Hardy, left, & Joel Edgerton, right, in WARRIOR (Photo: Chuck Zlotnick)

WARRIOR
Directed by
Gavin O’Connor
Produced by
O’Connor & Greg O’Connor
Written by Connor, Anthony Tambakis & Cliff Dorfman
Released by Lionsgate
USA. 139 min. Rated PG-13
With
Joel Edgerton, Tom Hardy, Jennifer Morrison, Frank Grillo, Nick Nolte& Kevin Dunn  
 

Well-made, beautifully acted, and hopelessly sappy, Warrior is an heir to one of film’s oldest traditions, the boxing melodrama. But times have changed, and so have our preferred methods for beating each other up. Gone is what used to be called the “the sweet science.” In its place, we have mixed martial arts.

The combat may be new, but the story isn’t. Warrior is essentially a male weepy, a tale of two estranged brothers who improbably wind up battling it out for the title of an international mixed martial arts tournament. Like last year’s The Fighter, which this resembles in oh-so-many ways, it’s a story of hard-living, working-class Irish-American fighters who work through their family and personal issues in the ring. And also like that flick, a couple of brilliant performances nearly—but not quite—lift it above the cheese.

The film opens as Tommy Conlon (Tom Hardy), a disgraced, pill-popping Marine, slinks back to Pittsburgh to meet up with his dad (Nick Nolte), a now-reformed alcoholic whom he last saw years ago when he and his mom fled to Washington State to escape his abuse. Tommy still hates his pop, and seems to have returned either because he has nowhere else to go (mom’s dead) or else to flaunt his hatred for the old man, now too guilt-ridden and defeated to stand up for himself.

Meanwhile, his brother, Brendan (Joel Edgerton), who decided to stay in the ’Burgh when Tommy left, now has it rough in Philadelphia. He’s behind on his mortgage, after having lost most of his savings paying for his young daughter’s medical bills. His wife (Jennifer Morrison, late of House) is forced to ply the late shift as a cocktail waitress. And Brendon, a high school physics teacher, tries to make some extra cash by moonlighting as a brawler in strip club parking lot fights. His principal (Kevin Dunn, the Transformers dad) gets wind of one of these, and soon he’s suspended, and the family faces foreclosure on the home.

Luckily, unlike most underwater Americans in the Rust Belt who lack convenient plot twists, Brendan finds a golden ticket: the upcoming Sparta MMA two-day tournament, with its $5 million purse. He gets in shape and a spot in the tourney with the reluctant help of a friend, a hip but gentlemanly MMA trainer who sports a tribal tattoo but makes his fighters work out to Beethoven. But wouldn’t you know, just a short drive away, the dour Tommy has also been training to get into Sparta—this time, with the help of his dad, who used to oversee his high school wrestling career. Tommy still hates dad, and makes it nastily clear at every step that he’s just using him for his Rocky IV-style, junkyard training regimen.

This is a slow, rumbling film, as brooding as its leads, with most of the fighting of the verbal and emotional, and not the fists and kicks, variety. But it all drives inevitably toward that climactic bout—brother against brother—whose final words, “I love you,” signal to the bros in the audience that this might be the first movie since Where the Red Fern Grows where it’s OK to cry.

The plot’s a bit of a mess, but with the focus firmly on the family drama, the improbability never really galls. Director and co-writer Gavin O’Connor, who helmed Miracle, an inspirational but true sports yarn about a plucky U.S. Olympic hockey team that beat its better-equipped Soviet rivals, manages oddly enough to imbue Warrior with the same air of slightly embellished reality. The fight choreography, at least to this MMA novice, is excellent. But as real fights are both more brutal and more surprising and the plot’s demands are obvious enough to render most outcomes predictable, you might be better off just catching a match on pay-per-view, if MMA is your thing. But who you wouldn’t get to see in an Ultimate Fighting Champion bout are Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton. Hardy was the best thing in the British indie Bronson. And he’s set to play the villain, Bane, in the next Batman film. Like Heath Ledger, I wouldn’t be surprised if he steals the show. Here, he captures Tommy’s coiled resentment well, always blank and hunched over, withdrawn or possibly just sagging under the weight of his immense trapezius muscles. Joel Edgerton has a more complex part, mixing sweetness with hardness, and does so admirably.

Both men, Hardy a Brit and Edgerton an Australian, seem at home in their Northeast, working-class milieu (and accents). True, their near-climactic confrontation on an Atlantic City beach the night before the big fight is meant to be a sort of grand, emotional showdown—yet it is darkly shot and stagey. But it doesn’t really detract from their work. As their half-hated alcoholic father, Nick Nolte seems to be coming through a strange odyssey of his own. He speaks almost entirely in growls, every word coming up from the pit of his stomach as though summoned by a necromancer. In one especially startling reading, he explains to Tommy why he chose him instead of another trainer. “The devil,” he growls suddenly, like he just saw him, “the devil you know.” Brendon Nafziger
September 11, 2011

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