Beatdown is a UFC fighting film that achieves something incredible. In a movie packed with bloody, brutal fights, it remains completely boring. After having seen Beatdown, we all of a sudden have a new found respect for successful action stars and filmmakers. You don't realize how enjoyable the good ones are until you see something like this. In Beatdown, Brandon (Rudy Youngblood) is a fighter in an underground fight club. His brother gambles away money owed to a mob boss and ends up beside the road with a slit throat. Brandon finds out about his brother’s debts and runs away. He goes home to a tiny town where his father (Danny Trejo) is still hanging out in a wheel chair and collecting his disability check. Brandon gets a job moving junk from one pile to another pile, and it turns out that his co-workers run their own hillbilly fight club. When they find out that he fights, they get him trained up and start having him fight the local talent for big payouts.
In the meantime, he falls in love with a local girl Erin (Susie Abromeit) whose brother Victor (Eric Balfour) does not approve of Brandon. Eventually, Brandon feels the need to go back and take revenge on the man who killed his brother. We would like to say that Beatdown is a fight movie that might be appealing to fans of the genre, but even that is questionable. Beatdown is simply a boring film dressed up to look like an action-packed testosterone thrill ride, starting with the music.
The soundtrack is full of up-and-coming rock bands who are trying to sound like Nickelback so they can get a record deal instead of doing the soundtracks for UFC films. The director covers every inch of the movie with this generic rock music, sometimes to great hilarity. In one scene, Brandon is at work hauling junk from the one pile in the yard to another while the soundtrack blares, but it ends up looking like a bad Chevy commercial instead of the manly montage it wants to be.
Another major problem is the editing. Dave Macomber, a stuntman, edited Beatdown. Macomber had not edited any films before and has not edited any since. I think that when Macomber sat down to edit Beatdown, he got overwhelmed with all the post-production editing tricks like a kid playing with iMovie. He sped parts up, slowed some down, and added slow shutter speed effects, usually to make the action on-screen look more exciting. Even during dialogue-heavy scenes, there will be a close up that feels out of place or an added special effect that can only be described as “whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!” All these special effects don’t engage the viewer. If anything, they take you out of the movie and reminded you that you're watching a very amateur production.
Predictable storylines in dance movies or fight movies are par for the course, but you can only get away with it if the dances and fights are well done. After all, the audience doesn’t show up for the character development. They buy tickets because they want to watch two people really beat the crap out of each other. Unfortunately, Beatdown couldn’t even get the fighting right.
While it was obvious that the fighters were at the top of their game, the film’s cinematographer could not properly film the bouts properly. Instead of choosing wider shots where the audience could see what was actually going on, the cinematographer chose baffling close-ups that showed only small pieces of the action. Beatdown was like those dance movies that cast non-dancers in leading roles, so instead of teaching the actor how to dance, they take a lot of close-up shots so that the actor can fake it. To be fair, even if Beatdown had properly filmed fight scenes, they probably would have been ruined by Dave Macomber’s editing.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
Special features include the theatrical trailer, featurettes about the making of the film, and a video of the Beatdown contest winner. There is also an audio commentary track with Rudy Youngblood, Susie Abromeit, and director Mike Gunther. While I really didn’t like Beatdown, I was impressed with the number of special features. I have seen many other better movies recently that skimped on the special features, so kudos to the folks behind the Blu-ray release.
"Beatdown" is on sale August 31, 2010 and is rated R. Action, Drama, Martial-Arts, Romance. Directed by Mike Gunther. Written by Mike Gunther, Bobby Mort, Sean Patrick O'Reilly. Starring Brett Brock, Desmond Aldridge, Eric Balfour, Michael Bisping, Rudy Youngblood, Susie Abromeit.
