Of all genres in cinema, the most rigid is the sports movie. Even the romantic comedy—currently enduring some kind of Cthulhic hell—has more surprises: you don't know which limpdick Katherine Heigl will pick before molting and turning into a demon vulture sorceress (Ed. Note: extrapolating the future after the credits roll in rom-coms is massive fun on the right drugs), not always. But sports movies (as opposed to movies that have sports in them; that sounds like semantic bullshit, but it's not) are unchanging. There will be an underdog. There will be a complete obfuscation of the sport in question in the name of allowing that underdog to win. There will be a victory by the underdog. And most of us, whether voluntarily or not, will cry. No matter what sport it is, the game is the game.
This holds true even as sports themselves change. Boxing has seen a decline over the last couple decades, starting roughly when Buster Douglas beat Mike Tyson and slowly fizzling to the point where very few of us are left who still give a fuck. It's not as though the public's taste for gladiatorial combat has waned, though; quite the opposite, boxing isn't quite brutal enough for us anymore, judging by both the emotional and psychological harm reality show contestants inflict on each other and the massive audiences for them, and in a more literal sense, the explosive growth in popularity of Mixed Martial Arts and the Ultimate Fighting Championship. While reality shows can (for the most part) go fuck themselves as far as I'm concerned, I have no issue with MMA or UFC whatsoever. As a lifelong boxing fan, it'd be massively hypocritical. It's for this reason that I see MMA taking over the place within the sports movie genre once occupied by boxing movies, and doing so fairly seamlessly. A good example of this is the upcoming release Warrior.
Warrior is very much a “sports movie.” Co-writer/director Gavin O'Connor is responsible for one of the better sports movies in recent memory, 2004's Miracle, about that time a million years ago when the Americans beat the Soviets in hockey and Al Michaels has had to be guarded around the clock to keep him from continuously masturbating ever since. Unlike a lot of sports movies, Miracle had the advantage of being true; the 1980 US hockey team is just about the only team in the history of sports that actually was as big an underdog as teams always are in sports movies. O'Connor managed to pull off the amazing feat of making a movie that appealed to teary-eyed sentimental sports jingoists and cynical fuckfaces like me in equal measure. For that alone, O'Connor would be in the Sports Movie Hall Of Fame (Alchemy Wing), but then he goes ahead and makes Warrior, arguably an even better movie, with a higher difficulty curve—it's fictional, and about a (for now, anyway) less mainstream sport—just to reinforce the point.
Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton star as brothers estranged from both each other and recovering alcoholic father Nick Nolte (their mother is not seen, sidelining the question of just how the fuck Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton are brothers). Tom Hardy shows up at Nick Nolte's door in Pittsburgh after 14 years, having inherited his pops' addictions, and shouldering the wait of a harrowing past for which Nick Nolte (drunk version) was responsible. Joel Edgerton is teaching high-school physics in Philadelphia, married to Cameron from House, and is up to his eyeballs in financial problems. He's sneaking off to participate in underground cash fights to help make ends meet. Meanwhile Tom Hardy starts working out at a gym in Pittsburgh that had been a boxing gym but now specializes in MMA. Tom Hardy hears someone mention money for fights, and promptly beats the living fucking shit out of one of the top middleweight MMA contenders in the world, impressing the guy who owns the place.
Soon, word gets out that some white guy in a suit (played by director O'Connor) has renounced his evil and is now organizing a winner-take-all MMA tournament to determine the world's alpha purveyor of ownage. Tom Hardy goes “sniffsniff . . . ownage? Fuck yeah I'm in.” Joel Edgerton sees this and thinks, “Wow, if I win that money I can pay off my ninety mortgages and keep Cameron from ditching me for Chase!” (Ed. Note: this is a very real fear, as both Joel Edgerton and Chase on House are Australians; girlfriend clearly has a type). They both enter. Meanwhile a subplot involving Tom Hardy being in Iraq and pulling off some of the mightiest feats in the history of testicles is introduced, though the question of why he deserted (which is telegraphed about an hour before Tom Hardy fesses up to it) is left open.
Before long, we're in Atlantic City for the tournament, called “Sparta” in an unsubtle but fun bit of imagery. While it's a total fait accompli that the final will be Tom Hardy vs. Joel Edgerton, the tournament itself features some colorful characters, including the guy whose ass Tom Hardy kicked to start his MMA career and this gigantic, terrifying Russian who's never been defeated (played by pro wrestler Kurt Angle, in an extremely effective performance). Meanwhile, the brothers have to have a scene where one of them (Joel Edgerton) tries to reconcile with the other one, who isn't having it (Tom Hardy). Each of them needs to confront Nick Nolte, but with the ultimate forgiveness impossible until the emotional climax of the big fight. Which will be won by . . . (warning: spoilers after this photo)
. . . Joel Edgerton. This is actually kind of obvious a while before it happens, because the rules of the sports movie dictate no uneasy moral choices at the end, and while Tom Hardy is fighting to give the $5 million purse to the widow of his fallen brother Marine (while uneasy morality may be out of bounds, kudos to this movie for having the stones to present nuance within morality, tackling the idea of biological vs. chosen families to such an extent), Joel Edgerton is fighting to save his house and family. And it's also totally obvious that, since that won't take up the whole $5 mil, Edgerton's going to drop a heavy chunk of change off with the widow, whereas if Tom Hardy won, he wouldn't give his brother shit. So you know Edgerton's going to win.
But that's the thing about sports movies. You know how they're going to end, that's not the point. We watch sports movies for the journey, and to see what details and flourishes are included along the way. Warrior introduces a whole lot of potential subplots and character stories, some of which are realized rather well and economically, some not at all. Nick Nolte's character is dealt with well right up until the end, when after an enormous blowup with Tom Hardy, where Tom Hardy is such a dick to Nick Nolte that even he realizes he's being an asshole, Nick Nolte relapses and gets fuuuuuuuuuuuuucked up on little minibar bottles of booze, only to recover almost immediately, which rings a little false (he bounces back pretty quick for someone without a drinking problem who's just hungover, let alone an addict having a major, operatic relapse). But even this isn't that big a deal, because he needs to be there to see the big fight between his two sons.
There lies Warrior's greatest assets: two massively testicular leading performances. Tom Hardy is basically a testosterone molecule with arms and legs in this. He does such a good job in the role that it's easy to overlook the fact that the character is kind of an asshole. He's been through a fucking ridiculously hard life—his dad left him to take care of his dying mother, then he was the only survivor of a “friendly fire” (Christ that fucking term is awful) incident in Iraq, after which he deserted and had to anonymously rip the door off a tank (dude's balls fucking clank, for real) to save a whole shitload of Marines, after which he's been on the run ever since. I mean, yeah, he's been through a lot. But he's still kind of a dick, and he's not that bright. Tom Hardy inhabits this dude to a degree that's a little alarming, but never to the point where it takes us out of the movie. It's just like, holy shit, dude.
Joel Edgerton, while considerably smarter and less consumed by anger, is every bit the fucking beast Tom Hardy is. As those of us who remember him from the twenty minutes or so he was in Animal Kingdom (where he was totally credible as the axis of those characters' universe), Joel Edgerton is a fucking ridiculous actor who needs to be one of the biggest movie stars in the world like immediately. It makes sense that he's a physics teacher, because you'd need to study for a long goddamn time to calculate the gravitational field around this dude's balls. His determination comes through in his fighting: even though he's the underdog in just about every fight he's in in the movie (too old, technical skills a little lacking, etc) he prevails because he needs it to a degree the other guy doesn't. This comes dangerously close to one of the most annoying cliches in sports—the scrappy underdog white guy who gets by with heart—but Joel Edgerton sells it because he's fucking awesome. And also, because MMA is a fickle enough beast that, as they point out zillions of times in the movie, any guy can win any fight.
That's one of the most important things that keeps Warrior from being a cloying, melodramatic, formula sports movie: it's just grounded enough in realism that Gavin O'Connor can look over at the glowing red Melodrama Button about two-thirds of the way through and just weld that motherfucker to the control panel and it's okay, because he's built up enough goodwill with the audience by being willing to give them a good movie up to that point, that it's almost like the melodrama of the climax is an equal and opposite reaction to the goodness of the rest of the movie, to borrow a bit from one of Edgerton's physics lectures. The self-awareness the movie displays about the melodrama helps as well; it's left to the TV announcer (who is, bizarrely, not Danny Nucci despite being a dead ringer) to relay the information that the combatants in the final fight are brothers.
While one's ability to go with the finale is entirely dependent on one's feeling that the movie earned (or didn't) the suspension of disbelief, there is one gaping hole in the middle of Warrior. Repeated mention is made of the guy who sets up the whole tournament, and that he's given up his career as a financial hotshot in order to bankroll the Sparta tournament. They mention him often enough that I was expecting him to show up and have some shadowy ulterior motive behind Sparta, which would have been fucking stupid, but it's kind of an unhappy medium between having him show up once and tell one of the ESPN guys “I'm not just the guy with all the money, I'm also a huge fan,” which would have been fine, and having him be some Rollerball-ass fuckin megalomaniac villain, which would have been retarded. It's a minor enough detail to be ultimately worth forgiving, especially since the more we found out about this character the less we probably would have liked him. I think the reason he's in the movie so much is that the character is played by the director. I could do one of my wild-ass feats of extrapolation and posit that having the character who sets up the whole tournament is the in-movie equivalent of the director who calls all the shots and sets up the whole movie, but I gotta pace myself with that kinda thing, and also I don't think it's on purpose, I think Gavin O'Connor just shot a bunch of footage of him acting and left it in because, hey, fuck it, it's his movie.
And the rest of it's really pretty fuckin good. It runs about two hours and twenty minutes, just like Miracle, which is a little alarming on paper but I can testify it's a quick two-twenty. The movie's engrossing, and is a sports movie in all the good ways and very few of the bad ones. The fact that parts of it are a little underwritten counts against Warrior less than it would a movie with a lesser cast. Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton, and Nick Nolte are all great, Jennifer Morrison is good enough that I really should stop calling her Cameron all the damn time (she plays an excellent disapproving wife, imbuing her with a bit more dimension than the character might have had), and Kevin Dunn shows up as Joel Edgerton's principal and grudging friend.
When Kevin Dunn shows up in a movie, it's generally a sign things are going to be okay (unless it's a Transformers movie, in which case it's a sign Kevin Dunn's getting fucking paid). He's a fucking rock, he's got great comic timing, and has aged shockingly slowly; he's still playing dudes the same age as he was twenty years ago.
So, if you want to see a really well-made, well-acted sports movie and don't nitpick excessively about script imperfections, go see Warrior. If for nothing else, you'll want to see Tom Hardy own the fucking fuck out of real-life MMA dudes and have it be totally plausible because his performance is so good, and Joel Edgerton being like “Hey, in a couple years I'll be a massive movie star!” And a sober Nick Nolte, which is a sight we haven't seen in . . . shit, have we ever seen a sober Nick Nolte? There's that for novelty's sake.
So yeah. Pretty good fuckin movie. Check it out when it drops this Friday.
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