ALL TAPPED OUT: Gavin O’Connor’s WARRIOR [4/10]

Published on: October 10th, 2011

The UK posters for Warrior bellow a promise that it’s “like all the Rocky movies rolled into one.” Promise – or threat? Because while sitting through the half-dozen instalments of Sylvester Stallone’s boxing saga would take up the best part of a day and leave one decidedly punch-drunk, it would probably still feel shorter than enduring the 140 minutes that comprise Gavin O’Connor’s shamelessly manipulative farrago of fight-movie clichés.

Not that the blame is all his – O’Connor co-wrote the script with Anthony Tambakis and Cliff Dorfman, neither of whom has a feature-film writing credit to their name, and this trio have concocted a story which doesn’t so much strain credulity at every turn as wrench it into agonisingly painful contortions. Rather like, one could say, the punishments dealt out by brothers Tommy (Tom Hardy) and Brendan (Joel Edgerton) as they progress through a $5m mixed martial-arts tournament broadcast nationwide from a seagull-infested Atlantic City. And also, one presumes, worldwide – the once-stigmatised MMA, which allows boxing, wrestling and various martial-arts movies – having quickly become a global phenomenon over the past decade.

But whereas the earliest days of cinema saw the new art-form embrace boxing with symbiotically lucrative results – as chronicled by Dan Streible in his terrific Fight Pictures - “cage-fighting” has so far proven much better suited to small screens (via television broadcasts, compilation DVDs and low-budget, straight-to-video pictures) than large. In 2008 David Mamet’s philosophically-inclined Redbelt hit selected multiplexes with a whispery thud that seems to have put the Pulitzer-winning playwright’s feature-directing career in a permanent choke-hold. A slightly harsh fate (“it’s not quite fair to reject Redbelt as a ludicrous, self-important compendium of absurdities…”, we wrote at the time, “there are incidental pleasures and grace-notes aplenty.”)

Released in the same year, Jeff Wadlow’s teen-oriented Never Back Down was a more unpretentious, fanciful affair, focussing on illicit under-age fight-clubs, but clicked with its target demographic to rack up healthy profits. The producers of Warrior clearly had more rarefied antecedents in mind, of course – Oscar-bait like Darren Aronofsky’s peerless The Wrestler and David O. Russell’s not-bad Fighter, the not-dissimilarly-titled latter also dealing with (real-life) feuding brothers in the post-industrial American north-east. And in more skilled hands Warrior might well have finally delivered poor old Nick Nolte, whose big break came as tough boxer Tommy Jordache in TV mini-series Rich Man, Poor Man (1976), his long-overdue first Academy Award – a dozen years after the statuette was effectively snatched from his gnarly grasp by Life Is Beautiful‘s Roberto Benigni.

Nolte’s belated recompense now looks sadly unlikely, and not just because Warrior has so conspicuously underperformed at American box-offices*. He certainly has his moments as Tommy and Brendan’s recovering-alcoholic dad Paddy – long-estranged from both his sons, but employed by the former to coach him for the MMA tournament – but not quite enough to justify early Oscar-talk. Pittsburgh-based Paddy’s obsession with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick - which he listens to on audio-cassettes – never feels like anything other than a screenwriting affectation, though this is a minor issue in a picture chock-full of contrivances, coincidences and implausibilities too numerous and too egregious to list.

One doesn’t even have to be any kind of MMA expert to detect that pretty much everything about this megabucks, high-profile welterweight tournament – which takes up about half of Warrior‘s bloated running-time (O’Connor’s Pride and Glory and Miracle also sprawled past the two-hour mark) – smacks of bogusness. The supposedly cream-of-the-crop 16-man field includes Brendan, a recently-suspended small-town physics-teacher – while the hot favourite, undefeated Russian wrecking-ball ‘Koba’, is a beast who’d only make welter by chainsawing an arm before the weigh-in.

In what’s otherwise a downbeat, dour enterprise the casting of (240lb) WWF star Kurt Angle as Koba (presumably 185lb) counts as a rare touch of nifty in-joke humour – the Olympic gold-medallist, who’s been known to deck himself in the Stars and Stripes on occasion, even gets to strut around among Russian flags and paraphernalia. Or rather, Soviet flags, as Koba makes his entrance accompanied by red banners bedecked with hammers and sickles – typical of Warrior‘s loopy idea of how professional 21st-century sportsmen might conduct themselves.

One has to feel sorry for Sam Sheridan and Bryan Callen, who as ringside commentators have to verbalise the increasingly unlikely developments unfolding before their eyes – “I’m struggling to put this into context”, they repeatedly gasp, including when the news emerges, just before the climactic Tommy-vs-Brendan finale (and that’s hardly a spoiler), that the pair are in fact … brothers! Not that what then unfolds is anything like the cagey non-event that results whenever, say, Venus and Serena Williams make it into a Slam final – rather a ferocious grudge-match between the animalistic, aggressively brutal Tommy and the more scientific, patient, clever approach of his guileful older sibling.

But while it’s a promising idea to contrast these chalk-and-cheese styles (crafty Brendan’s against-the-odds progression through the tournament casts MMA in a flatteringly positive light), O’Connor and company, like some kind of Ron Shelton on steroids, can’t resist going way, way over the top as Tommy’s never-say-die spirit leads him to battle on and on, and on – even when he loses the use of an arm. Given what’s gone before, we nevertheless half expect valiant ex-marine Tommy to force a draw despite this insuperable disability – indeed, after a while the movie’s sole suspense resides in seeing how far the script dares to venture into absurdity while keeping such a straight, macho face.

The fact that Warrior remains at all watchable is largely due to the energetic charisma of its stars – and while Hardy, whose freakish shoulder-muscles suggest he’s well on the way to incarnating muscle-monster Bane in the upcoming Batman picture, veers towards a mumbly-method caricature of self-loathing surliness, Edgerton (on this evidence, and Animal Kingdom, the Aussie thesp a rival to Jeremy Renner as Hollywood’s next action-hero) deserves considerable credit for keeping Brendan even marginally sympathetic.

This is a man, it’s easy to forget, whose desperation to win the $5m prize results directly from his inability to keep up mortgage payments on his family’s house – a residence which is evidently larger and fancier than he and his wife (Jennifer Morrison, in what insultingly passes for the film’s main female role) can actually afford. Brendan’s berserk solution to his financial woes isn’t quite as jaw-droppingly absurd as Kim Basinger so very conveniently winning the bingo at the end of 8 Mile, nor does Warrior ever stoop to the offensive depths of the worst big-budget boxing picture in recent memory, Ron Howard’s indefensible  Cinderella Man (though the idea of nicknaming a black contender ‘Midnight’ is a step in that direction) . But it’s a crying shame that O’Connor’s picture should even be mentioned among such undistinguished company – not content with delivering just another meat-and-potatoes fight-picture, he instead dishes up a double serving of prize beefcake, rendered indigestible by uncontrolled dollops of purest corn.

Neil Young
10th October, 2011

WARRIOR : [4/10] : USA 2011 : Gavin O’CONNOR : 140m (BBFC) : {11/28}
….. seen 9th October at Empire cinema, Sunderland (£6.50) 35mm

* British audiences have also stayed away in their droves – though it’s notable that Sunderland, arguably the UK’s equivalent of Pittsburgh, is proving an exception.
Three weeks into Warrior‘s release here, the Sunderland city-centre multiplex is still showing the picture four times a day – in most other cities it’s either already finished or is on its very last legs.
From Friday (14th), however, Warrior‘s screenings at the Sunderland Empire go down to one per day – perhaps to make room for a rather different type of ring action in the Hugh Jackman robot-boxing extravaganza, Real Steel.