I'm kind of a huge meathead, so I'm admittedly biased towards movies that revolve around two humans clobbering each other to jelly in the middle of a cage. So maybe it's not surprising that I found the mixed-martial-arts underdog story/he-ain't-heavy-he's-my-brother family drama Warrior to be an emotional experience, despite how familiar most of it is. The movie is about as subtle as its title suggests, and it doesn't really break new ground in any sense of the word, but it's moving in a blatant sort of way. The tricks it uses to work your tear ducts and adrenaline glands are tried and true (and delivered, it's got to be said, with the finesse of an atom bomb), but they still work pretty well.
The director Gavin O'Connor also made Miracle, the 2004 feel-gooder about the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Olympic hockey game, so Warrior is being packaged primarily as a underdog story in that film's vein. But really it's closer to O'Connor's gritty, underseen '08 police drama Pride and Glory, about two brothers-in-law who come to a violent clash over police corruption in New York City.
The stakes in Warrior are considerably less sweeping, although they're certainly nothing to scoff at. The screenplay, by O'Connor and several other scribes, pits a pair of estranged brothers named Brendan (Joel Edgerton of Animal Kingdom) and Tommy (Tom Hardy from Inception) against each other in a sixteen-man MMA tournament with a $5 million purse. Brendan is a happily married teacher (Jennifer Morrison gives a luminous woman's touch as his wife) with kids but no money; Tommy is a pill-popping wrecking machine who reappears after a years-long absence, burdened by a past he'd seemingly rather forget. Working the sidelines is the boys' father, a Nick Nolte-like train wreck who's actually played by Nick Nolte and courting redemption as Tommy's trainer.
Coming into the tournament, it's no surprise that Tommy, who enters thanks to a YouTube video of him pounding some dude into la-la-land, is a heavy favorite, while Brendan, an unremarkable fighter who enters through force of will, is greeted with collective apathy and expected to make a quick exit. Two guesses as to who meets in the finals.
The movie is all rah-rah adrenaline pump on the surface, but there's a hideous mean streak underneath all of it that can be glimpsed every once in a while, usually during the interactions between the boys and their father. What must have happened between them, you wonder, but the movie never goes far enough into it to give the undertones much juice beyond the obvious. What the movie does get right, though, is the steady reveal of Tommy's backstory, and how the character goes from mysterious to heroic to disgraced in the span of a few scenes. By the time he ends up as a villain, the twist caps off one of the more subtly brilliant character-building efforts of the year, ironically in a movie where subtlety is the last thing on the menu.
As for the boys themselves, Hardy cuts a far more imposing figure when he's silent. Built like a bulldozer with an impressively dead-eyed stare and barely concealing a wave of unchained rage, Tommy is one of the more terrifying characters of the year. Hardy sells Tommy's conflict well physically, but tends to push too hard with the dialogue, laying a heavy Balboa-ian slur and working hard to invest each line with the utmost seriousness and pain. Edgerton is quiet and graceful and gives the more consistent performance of the two, although it's admittedly tough to buy someone as well-adjusted as Brendan as a dominant fighter, no matter how desperate he is. (Also tough to buy: how Tommy's Mack-truck punches can fell human mountains with names like Mad Dog Grimes in seconds, but the wiry Brendan can take rounds and rounds of his shots and remain upright.)
The buildup is slow and thick in its melodrama, but once the tournament rolls around, O'Connor unleashes the movie into a terrible, exhilarating final act. The coup de grace is, obviously, the Jimmy-Tommy clash, but their earlier fights are completely thrilling in their own right. The editing is a little too frantic and the shots a little too close, focusing mostly on visions of men's contorted faces than what exactly it is they're doing (Brendan the submission artist is lovingly framed by O'Connor's camera), but they get the job done. Big kudos to the sound and music guys, too, every punch these fighters throw sounds like a five-car collision, and the sweeping score suggests "Gonna Fly Now" on PEDs.
The movie plays up the brothers' conflict (both fight for righteous causes, but they have to go through each other) for so long it doesn't immediately register that the two only have a couple of scenes together. One works and one doesn't quite. The one that doesn't is where all the talking is done and that, really, is the problem here. These aren't guys who were born to talk, they were born to fight, but the movie is so dead serious (like Pride and Glory) that it misses out almost entirely on the joyful catharsis of sport (like Miracle, or Rocky for that matter). Despite an oddly optimistic ending, this is perhaps the least happy movie of the year; every win for its characters seems to come with some kind of a terrible caveat, and even the final scene (a three-hanky tearjerker, BTW) hints at hardships yet to come. It's a lie to say it doesn't work. But sometimes, you kind of wish Warrior was less a film about necessity and more about passion. You know, an old-school sports movie about two guys who punch like battering rams, run up mountains, and eat lighting and crap thunder.
