With a the number of films released covering a whole plethora of sporting dramas it was probably inevitable that sooner or later someone would release a film based around the sport of mixed martial arts, or MMA for short. A mixture of strike and grapple techniques from a wide variety of other combat sports and responsible for a series of bone breakages not for the faint hearted on YouTube, the sport is brought to the screen in the shape of Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior.
The film begins with Tom Hardy’s Tommy Riordan coming home to visit his father Paddy Conlon, who fails to convince Tommy that he has truly changed his ways after an abusive past with his family and a battle to overcome alcoholism. The next day Tommy goes to a local gym where he knocks out a local fighter in seconds, leading to a mobile phone video of the fight going viral on the internet, and Tommy to learn of an upcoming MMA tournament named Sparta with a $500,000 prize on offer to the winner. Tommy returns to ask for his father’s help in training him for the tournament with the one condition that their partnership does not mean anything personal to him nor is it to lead to a reconciliation between the two.
The third part of the main trio of the film’s narrative then picks up the story of Brendan Conlon, a high school physics teacher who is falling on progressively harder financial times with his wife and two daughters. Due to those financial pressures and with his youngest daughter needing open heart surgery Brendan falls back on his past as a UFC fighter to fight in amateur fights for money in the evenings. A series of fights leads to rumours spreading around the school about his bouts and leads to his suspension from his teaching post. With no other choice left open to him Brendan returns to smaller fights and begins training with an old friend Frank Campara, a path that leads him to the Sparta tournament.
Uses a split screen technique to cover the trainings regimes of Tommy and Brendan and the contrasting approaches of their respective trainers, with Tommy’s dad Paddy relying on “old school’ techniques from his boxing past whereas Brendan is depicted in more of a modern setting and style of training. That doesn’t mean that anyone should expect any Rocky style of trainer/fighter relationship montages, as Warrior is much more along the lines of recent efforts such as The Fighter. There is also some nice use of colour tones in some scenes to produce a harsher, bitter look to some scenes and when the MMA fight scenes do come up in the story the sequences feel bone crunchingly real, and despite the potential for them to get confused are well shot and edited together so the filmgoer doesn’t get lost with the story of the fight or which moves are being executed.
There are some echoes of the emotional plot arc of Cinderella Man and a family battle that exists or more than one level not too dissimilar from that seen in the excellent The Fighter in the not too distant past. Whereas Joel Edgerton’s Brendan has the more open emotional story what is interesting is how the film restrains itself from revealing too much about Tommy’s backstory and his marine past. It is to Tom Hardy’s credit that a character who is both distant and more animalistic could easily be too dislikable for the audience to get interested in or invest in, instead there is a boiling animosity that hints at a greater pain and depth to him to discover as the film progresses. Probably the most notable performance is that of Nick Nolte who gives what must be one of his best performances for years, as Paddy truffles to try and rebuild bridges with the family he has left who remain closed off to his attempts to reconcile with them due to a past that is shrouded in mystery and left him a broken older man with faith and hope left to cling to and it’s an engaging performance by Nolte that is backed up by the fire of Tom Hardy and the steely determination shown by Joel Edgerton – one scene between the two of them is one of the film’s focal points and standout moments
Whilst not quite as good as the aforementioned The Fighter, nor a film that will redefine the genre of sporting films Warrior does offer is a well crafted story and a trio of strong main characters with a story and background that develops well and isn’t rushed through for the sake of getting more fight time in. At near 120 minutes it is one of the longer sporting dramas out there but one that doesn’t feel like a long film which is always a sign of a film that has managed to entertain and provide a story solid enough to warrant the time spent on it.
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