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Movie:		2.0
Picture:		5.0
Sound:		4.0
Extras:		3.0
Score:		3.0

Director(s):	Hector Echavarria
Writer(s):	David Storey
Starring:	BJ Penn • Georges St. Pierre • Hector Echavarria • Patrick Kilpatrick • Silvia Koys
Genre:	Action
Release Date:	April 28, 2009
Rated:

List Price:	DVD - $26.98
Amazon:

If the behind the scenes documentaries on the DVD of Never Surrender are to be believed (and they ALWAYS are), this film was meant to be a major break-through for the world of mixed-martial arts. What is mixed martial arts, you’re probably not asking? If the plot of this film is any indication, it’s a place for really insecure guys to try and prove they’re not gay by taking their shirts off and wrestling each other. In a sense, this movie is the blood brother of Troy, a film so terrified of appealing to anyone but manly straight men that it is absolutely hilarious to everyone else. Except that you get the joke in the first ten minutes, and then there’s the whole rest of the movie to sit through.

Hector Echavarria (who also directed and provided the story) stars as Diego Carter, who is the best fighter in the world. This point is reiterated ad nauseum by such means as news show commentaries, spoken dialogue (his friends mention it several times), and the fact that he’s constantly beating up dudes who are mad that they lost bets that they placed against him (obviously, they were unaware that he was the BEST FIGHTER IN THE WORLD). But still, there’s something missing in Diego’s life. Enter Sandra (Silvia Koys), the kind of woman you might find in the back pages of Maxim magazine, who lures him into an underground world of fighting, led by the mysterious and vaguely foreign Seifer (Patrick Kilpatrick). But this world of cage fighting isn’t like the other world of cage fighting. People actually get killed here, and if you win, you get to sleep with one of the sex slaves that Seifer keeps on hand. But for some reason, this wasn’t the first tip-off to our hero that something was wrong, so he gets further and further involved, until his friends have to get him out of there.

So the plot is ridiculous, the script is awful (personal favorite line: “you’ll have to forgive him. He was raised in the woods”), and the acting, done mostly by MMA fighters is about what you’d expect. But I can acknowledge that this is all peripheral to the central issue: is the fighting any good? I’m not the absolute best judge of this, but everything I saw reminded me of the little I’ve seen of shows like VIP that air on networks like UPN. In short: a weird angle of a really deliberate move, cut to another weird angle of an obviously faked move, cut to one character laying on the ground, beaten. Whether or not that qualifies as good or not, I really can’t say, but most of the time, I couldn’t help but thinking that I’d be having a whole hell of a lot more fun if I was watching a similarly budgeted Hong Kong film.

This film is ridiculously bad, but you probably could have guessed that on your own. And I did laugh out loud a number of times, so it could probably be enjoyed on that level. But in no way can I say that this movie is worth your time, your energy, or your money.

DVD Bonus Features

"Behind the Scenes of Never Surrender": a short documentary that is mostly composed of handheld zoom shots of the production, along with the occasional face to face interview with people in the cast and shots from the film.

"Anatomy of a Fight": basically the same thing, only a little bit shorter, and focusing a little bit more on a particular fight in the film

The Never Surrender Trailer, which spends most of its time announcing the various MMA fighters that appear in the film.

Music Video for "Adrenaline" by Twelve Stones: mostly the same footage as the trailer (as in time spent announcing the different MMA fighters), interspersed with concert footage of the band.