In 7 words or less: Rocky in a cage.
What's it all About? Minor spoilers follow. A big time entrepreneur brings his mixed martial arts organisation to Atlantic City and puts on a tournament to find the best middleweight on the planet. As with all these types of films, the best from around the world enter the cage but the real focus here is on brothers Tommy and Brendan. One a former marine and one a school teacher, do they have the stuff to enter the cage and walk away with the £5 mil prize money? I'm not going to spoil it that much, come on, give me some credit. Oh yeah, Nick Nolte plays the recovering alcoholic father.
Best bits? The acting from the three leads is top stuff. No trailers or any video footage as I don't want to give away too many spoilers.
Did it make you think thoughts? Great, great casting. The three leads are all perfect. After recently having seen Joel Edgerton (Brendan) in The Thing I thought, 'Oh no, not this chump again'. Egg on my face. He's great as the struggling family man who leads a double life as a back street mma fighter. His brother Tommy (Tom Hardy) is the brooding, tough nut with tons of emotional problems. Add in Nick Nolte as the dad who mumbles, grumbles and shouts his way through the film and you're left with a cracking relationship drama-addled firecracker of a flick. Even though we get a lot of build up it does feel in some parts that we need to guess what has gone on to lead these characters to act the way they do and sometimes it goes the opposite way and becomes overcrowded with back story (the marine thing in Iraq)
One of the things that stands out is the way the film has footage of a fight early on but then you have to wait over an hour until you get the main events. It's very Rocky-like in the way it builds up the characters so you have some emotional investment by the time the ass-kicking, knock-down, drag-out scraps assault the senses. Talking of the fights, as a massive mma fan, The Chief was fairly impressed with what he saw here. Obviously they're not 100% realistic, cutting out some the slower, stalling action that inevitably happens in real fights and the fighters don't seem to get as damaged as most of the fights I've seen but on the whole they are done really well.
The only major downside is the last 20 minutes which I had attempted to predict but had decided that as the film hadn't strayed into the standard over the top hollywood commercialised tripe for the first hour and 40 mins, it wouldn't do so now. Oh dear, I was disappointed. Also the training montage (I love training montages) is the pits. Whoever's idea it was to have the picture go 4 way split screen should be shot.
Would you watch it again? Yeah, it was a real surprise for me. I had heard good things but was sceptical and thought the 'yes' people were wrong. Glad I tried it.
Rating (out of 100%): This had definitely put me in the mood for a Rocky watch, maybe even a Rocky season (bbrrrr Rocky V). I give Warrior a spin kicking, palm slapping, rear naked choking 80%
