TWO pretty high school guys who look like they’d be more at home in Sephora than in a boxing ring take up brawling in “Never Back Down,” a formula flick that should have tapped out in the script stage.
Sean Faris, who looks like Eric Bana Jr., plays a teenage Iowa football player who transfers to a new school in Florida, where he immediately forgets about football. Instead, a local bully (Cam Gigandet) goads him into an X-treme form of hand-to-hand combat, “mixed martial arts,” and humiliates him at a party in front of the whole school. It’s the kind of fight where you can do pretty much everything to your opponent except call in an artillery strike.
After 20 minutes, it’s clear that we’re going to spend the rest of the movie simply waiting for the new guy to beat the bully and get the girl. But he does the latter halfway through the movie, leaving us with an hour of padding.
So get ready for a bunch of training montages – one of them is a training montage about the trainer (Djimon Hounsou) – plus several scenes in tight succession in which the good guy, the villain and the Hounsou figure all whine about their daddy issues. Also, we keep cutting away to watch the hero’s little brother play tennis.
By the time we get back to the ass-kicking, X-treme boredom has set in.
Running time: 113 minutes. Rated PG-13 (violence, profanity, sexual situations, all involving teens). At the Empire, the 84th Street, the Kips Bay, others.