Warrior: A Bona Fide MMA Movie

You’ve seen this one before.

No, seriously. Not just because it’s a fighting movie and you’ve already seen Rocky. You’ve actually seen this exact movie before if you’ve seen the movie trailer, which literally gives away all one hundred and forty minutes of Warrior minus the last ten. And you know what? It doesn’t even matter.

Because Warrior is just a damned good movie.

There’s a paper-thin fine line between calling something a cliché because you roll your eyes before walking out, and saying that there were some clichéd elements but you didn’t care because you were too busy fighting to make sure you weren’t actually getting choked up at a movie about mixed-martial arts.

Warrior is the latter: a bona fide MMA movie full of bone-crushing hits, kicks, body slams, choke-outs, training montages, leg grapples, and split-second knockouts. But while the top-ranked fighter in Sparta – the film’s central winner-take-all tournament – is a seemingly unbeatable Russian, the rest of Warrior’scues take their nods more from Rocky Balboa than Rocky IV, spending time establishing the main characters, brothers Tommy (Tom Hardy), Brendan (Joel Edgerton), and their father Paddy Conlon (Nick Nolte) and their troubled history before we get to the inevitable bloodbath to follow.

That’s why it works. Unlike the endless Stallone saga, or most other fighting flicks you’ll see, there’s no big enemy. There’s no Apollo Creed. No Clubber Lang. Not even a Mason Dixon. There doesn’t need to be because from the minute you walk into the movie theater you know that it’s all coming down to brother versus brother. Anyone who gets in their way is trivial. What drives it all is the time we spend with each brother – Tommy, the brooding Iraq war vet who comes back to have their formerly alcoholic and estranged father train him; and Brendan, the physics teacher who married his high school sweetheart but faces foreclosure unless he finds a way to make more money. We feel for them both. We want them both to win.

But the movie’s called Warrior, not Warriors.

Even though they both are. They all are, including Paddy, in an incredible performance by Nolte. It’s hard to imagine that Nolte didn’t draw from his own personal addictions for his powerful role as the now-sober patriarch of the Irish family from Pittsburgh who alienated both of his sons years before while deep in the bottle. There’s a particularly moving scene where Paddy drives over to Philadelphia to visit Brendan, to tell him that Tommy is back in town, while granted it includes some clichéd, maudlin dialogue, Nolte takes it to the next level. There’s so much emotion going on behind Nolte’s baby blues that you can’t help but feel for this pathetic creature who is probably getting what he deserves.

With a documentary-style visual palette a la Friday Night Lights, director/co-writer Gavin O’Connor’s strengths lie in making us feel for every single character nearly immediately. (Of course, it helps that he cast superb actors in the leads roles.) He and co-writers Anthony Tambakis and Cliff Dorfman rightly choose not to focus on the training so much as the relationships between these men. It’s not a David versus Goliath story like when Rocky took on Drago. Rather it’s about these regular, flawed men exorcising their respective demons, the physical elements being a manifestation of their internal battles. That elevates this from just a fighting movie to a touching, stand-up-and-cheer movie that you’ll find yourself loving despite the fact that you know pretty much everything that’s going to happen except for which brother will be left standing.

As satisfying as it was, Warrior actually left me wanting more. I grew attached to these characters. And not everything was wrapped up in a neat little bow. The fight definitely solved a bunch of the film’s conflicts, but there’s still enough going on to imagine these people existing out there in the world. It’s the outcome of creating compelling, three-dimensional characters, which is something that can turn decent stories into great ones.

And Warrior has a great story to begin with. Sure, one that we’ve all seen before, but it’s also one, when done well, that we’ll go see again every chance we get.