WARRIOR (Gavin O’Connor). 139 minutes. Opens Friday (September 9). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NN
Warrior starts as a drama about a broken family and devolves into blatant cheerleading for mixed martial arts when two estranged brothers enter the same high-stakes tournament.
Happily married physics teacher Brendan (Joel Edgerton) returns to parking-lot cage fighting to stave off foreclosure on his home. His brother Tommy, the embittered loner (Tom Hardy), drifts into town to train with their father (Nick Nolte), a recovering alcoholic whom both brothers despise.
The first two-thirds concentrates on Dad’s attempts at reconciliation, the disapproval Brendan faces from his wife and school principal, and above all, the secret that’s destroying Tommy.
Hardy, Edgerton and Nolte are all watchable actors giving solid performances, but the conflicts don’t develop. Once the big punch-ups start, the conflicts wither to bonehead simplicity until one spectacularly ludicrous and emotionally false climactic sentence sinks the entire movie.
The action is staged for thrills and to showcase the fighters’ courage and technique. It’s exciting stuff, but the cutaways to Brendan’s former antagonists cheering him on and a group of uniformed Marines singing their anthem to honour Tommy give the proceedings an air of cheesy hype.
