Is there anything as sentimental and overwrought as a fight film? Movies like “Warrior” don’t realize that pum meling, kicking and mauling are things that should never be done to the tear ducts.
Generic as it is, the title, being singular, doesn’t even apply to this mixed-martial arts movie, which pays equal attention to two estranged brothers. Any guesses about whether they’ll meet in the ring for the championship? Guess correctly and you can skip the first hour and 45 minutes of this long, long sit.
“Warrior” is a cheap exploitation picture wrapped in miles and miles of stale would-be Oscar scenes, the most hilarious of which features Nick Nolte reeling around a hotel room carpeted with empty booze bottles listening to “Moby-Dick” on tape and crying, “Stop the ship! Stop the ship!” A lot of films are 10 minutes too long. This one could have been cut by 40.
As in his previous exercise in cliché and bombast, the 2008 cop drama “Pride and Glory,” writer-director Gavin O’Connor seems to be working from the 1937 Warner Bros. screenwriters’ manual. Nolte’s old Irish bastard and ex-fight trainer is — really — called “Paddy Conlon.” His sons, sensitive family man Brendan (Joel Edgerton) and loutish bad boy Tommy (Tom Hardy), are feuding slabs of meat who hate the old man for being an abusive daddy while they were growing up.
Tommy also has a strange quarrel with Brendan for staying on the East Coast to marry his girlfriend when Tommy and his mom, whom Brendan didn’t realize was dying, fled the old man and headed west. What kind of a man is Tommy for carrying a grudge about this for years? Emotionally, he’s at the same level as the 10th-graders who are no longer BFFs because Nicole didn’t invite Ava to her birthday party.
Hoping to arrive at “gritty” and “realistic,” O’Connor instead gets stranded at “dingy” and “dull.” The entire movie looks like it was buried in dust for six months, then thrown in the dryer with a quart of 10W-40. Even if you could run a squeegee over it, you wouldn’t find much. The big training montage midway through the film is about as exciting as the intro sequence to the 6 o’clock newscast in Columbus, Ohio. What’s easier to put together than a training montage? All you need is a cool song and a decent editor.
Moreover, though there are some suitably rousing fights in the final act, in the first 75 minutes there are only two, brief, warm-up bouts in which we see that, yes, each of the brothers can tussle. Surrounding these bits are whiny, slow-paced scenes about background problems. Dudes: You are in a movie called “Warrior.” We don’t need a lot of material about your day job or your mortgage.
What we want to know about is how to win a mixed-martial arts fight — one that allows kicking, kneeing, elbowing, choking and even sitting on the other guy’s chest and redesigning his face along Picasso themes. The “unorthodox” trainer who works with Brendan teaches him to . . . um, listen to lots of Beethoven. Also, he keeps shouting, “Listen to the music” and “relax.” Relax? When a guy is stomping on your windpipe?
The central characters, despite the vast amount of screen time developing them, never catch on. Rocky Balboa fought for pride and a need to prove himself. Brendan, sheepish and depressed, is getting in the “cage” only because he needs to save his house from foreclosure. His Adrian-like wife says things like, “You could get killed,” refuses to watch him fight, then pops into the arena for the climax.
Tommy, who walks around hunched over like Mr. Burns, is a surly, muttering jerk who (as we learn late in the film) should be in prison for a crime the movie shrugs off. And the bad guys — one Mohawked, the other Russian — seem to be there only so we’ll know that the director has also seen “Rocky III” and “IV.” Neither of these villains comes into focus, either: The Russian, Koba, doesn’t even get any real dialogue.
“Warrior” is the type of movie that tries to convince us that what we’re seeing is important because, we keep being told, its heroes have popped up on YouTube or are watched on sports TV. But in those cases, the primary attraction to viewers is the notion that we’re witnessing reality — unfiltered, unpredictable, raw. The movie is strictly machine-made, as genuine as those distressed-looking “vintage” T-shirts they sell at Target.