Stories about tension between fathers and sons are not rare, and this one is set in the world of mixed martial arts fighting. Cash (Stephen Dorff), an MMA world champion, is hyper-masculine, misogynistic, and racist. He lives in a world of luxury and is grooming his teenage son, Jet (Darren Mann), to be just like him, to the extent that Jet almost fails calculus because of training and traveling to fights out of town. 

Cash is a survivor of child abuse, and he now has a toxic, bullying relationship with Jet. Furthermore, he scarcely acknowledges his younger teenage son, Quinn (Colin McKenna), who was born with Williams syndrome, and he does not lend financial help to his ex-wife, Susan (Elizabeth Reaser), with whom his sons live. There are intimations of a traumatic event involving the two sons that led to the couple’s separation, and Jet, from the beginning, is fully aware of Cash’s harmful nature. Embattled is about him, his divided loyalties, and his struggles to define himself in spite of his father.

If the above sounds clichéd, a fair amount of it is, though director Nick Sarkisov and writer Dave McKenna deserve credit for a sensitive depiction of a boy with Williams syndrome. (The screenwriter has a son with the developmental disorder.) Nevertheless, the film is fueled by Cash’s unrelenting viciousness to the extent that, even if we have objections, there is a part of us anxious to know what will happen next. The most compelling, and brutal, sequences are the fights, and all parties involved are admirably in shape for what must have been a physically grueling experience. There is an often excessive, and somewhat ridiculous, reliance on slow motion in these scenes, but, especially in the final fight, the outcome is never predictable. 

This is, however, the sort of film where, once you start to pull one string, the whole thing unravels. Given that the fights are emphasized, the characters’ survival of them, with little lasting physical injury and no mental trauma, strains belief, and many aspects of the too-involved plot are skated over without much care. For instance, Jet is failing calculus in the beginning but later miraculously passes. While we are aware that he has been working with a tutor, we only see this once, and there is no sense of his struggle to turn himself around. This might sound like nitpicking, but this and many other events strain believability. Supporting characters, like Jet’s love interest, Keaton (Ava Capri), are thinly developed, and many lines of dialogue strike the viewer as barely concealed exercises in exposition. 

Most disconcerting of all, though, is Jet, who makes less sense the more you think about him. Yes, he wants to fight but is struggling with a father who he knows is abusive; yes, he’s torn between two parents who hate each other; yes, he also struggles with responsibility to his younger brother. However, except for a few convenient moments when he recalls a traumatic memory and explodes, he seems oddly unaffected by all he’s been through. Furthermore, it’s confusing as to why he wants to continue fighting when he has such a strained relationship with Cash. This contradiction seems more like a flaw on the writer’s part than the deliberate rendering of an ambiguous situation.

Still, Embattled is a decent, though flawed, attempt to tackle toxic masculinity through film, and will probably be of interest to fans of MMA fighting. It’s a hard film either to fully embrace or reject, and whatever reservations one has, one still has to admit that it’s fairly engaging for the territory it approaches rather than the skill of its execution.