Even when it’s not a true story, it’s always amazingly easy to predict the outcome of a sports movie. If the hero doesn’t win the whole damn thing, they at least make it to the final bout. The point of most sports movies, after all, isn’t to be surprising, but to be inspirational. With that in mind, Warrior never tries to hide the fact that the MMA tournament it’s about is going to come down to Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton, the film’s two leads.
As far as inspirational goes, it’s pretty weak. The main motivation for our heroes’ fighting spirits is neither pride nor glory, just money. They need the money, so they gotta win. The film even provides some good arguments as to why these guys should not fight, and the counterargument is just a simple “But the money!” With the country in its current economic state, though, maybe money is the most persuasive motive of all.
Previously, Gavin O’Connor’s most successful movie, Miracle, uses hockey to comment on the Cold War dynamic between the US and the Soviet Union. Here, it’s pretty hard not to see the two estranged brothers that the movie centers on as two warring sides of America: the soldier who’s sacrificing himself for others but feels discarded and sees the other side as weak, versus the public servant whose middleclass status is being taken away and keeps the other side out of mind. The former keeps stomping all over his opponents while the latter struggles into victory match-by-match, because that’s the way it is with their institutions. The fact that the MMA tournament’s cash prize is provided by an independent rich banker just cinches it. Warrior is basically watching the education system and the military scrapping over Wall Street’s money inside America’s octagon. Based on this timely allegory, you can probably make a guess as to who would be the ideal winner of the fight, and how to console the losing side. Not that the film has any particular insight into the current milieu, mind you. It’s just using the state of the nation as the metaphorical fuel for two people to pound the shit out of each other for our amusement.
Meanwhile, though, given the Americana in them, who should the audience root for? The film’s two separate narratives is a deliberate way for O’Connor to create that dilemma, because there are two heroes in this story, of equal measure. Tom (Hardy) is a war hero who fights so he can give the prize money to someone else who deserves it, while Brendan (Edgerton) is a public school teacher who fights so his family’s home wouldn’t be repossesed by the bank. The fact that these two guys play them so well and so charismatically adds to that dilemma. Edgerton is lovable and sympathetic in his goofy good-guy demeanor, while Hardy is immensely convincing as the terrifying and tortured fighter with a heart.
Aside from this playful gimmick, though, the rest is still the usual underdog cliche, served up in doubles. The heart-to-heart with their old man? We got one for each brother. Same with the shots of their friends cheering for them through the TV, same with that moment of doubt and the last-minute encouragement, and same with the training montage before the big event. It’s two Rockys in one movie.
The MMA scenes themselves are serviceable. They’re authentic enough to actually represent the sport it is depicting, but also stylized enough to make it more exciting for a layman that the average MMA fight would not. The film fares better in the first half because that's where it frontloads all the drama. We’re treated with the fractured brotherhood and the great performances from Hardy and Edgerton, as well as a scraggly, barely understandable Nick Nolte as their recovering alcoholic father, and then the tournament starts and it becomes a far less interesting movie fast.
The weirdest aspect of the film is that it brings up the troubling aspect of MMA’s world of violence and silences them with no rebuttal whatsoever. Earlier in the film, Brendan’s wife is furious at him for fighting again even though he was already previously hospitalized (“I don’t want our daughter to be raised in a family where her father gets beat up for a living!”). It’s a legitimate point, but the film treats her like she’s a nagging wife who just doesn’t understand that men just gotta fight... you know, for money. So of course, for no reason at all, really, she is then moved by watching her husband fight on TV and transforms into a supportive wife who urges him not to give up.
This makes it so hilariously apt that the promoter, played by the director himself, says the reason the tournament even exists is because: “When you’re a kid, you wanna know who’s the toughest kid in the neighborhood, right? Well, I wanna know who the toughest guy on the planet is.” In other words, Warrior posits that MMA exists as a sport because boys will always want to compare big swinging dicks, and there ain’t nothin’ you can do about it.
"Warrior" opens September 9, 2011 and is rated PG13. Drama, Sports. Directed by Gavin OConnor. Written by Gavin O'Connor & Anthony Tambakis & Cliff Dorfman. Starring Joel Edgerton, Nick Nolte, Tom Hardy, Jennifer Morrison, Frank Grillo, Kurt Angle.
