Warrior (2011)
Tom Hardy vs... that other guy. I'd heard this described as two small generic stories glued together to make a full feature. Certainly I think it makes sense to consider the story of each of the two brother protagonists separately when critiquing this film.
Tom Hardy is a stoic badass. He's like Snake Plissken without the eyepatch and with more awesome ass-kicking skills. The opening scene features him confronting his ex-alcholic dad, giving the dad a (well-deserved) hard time over his past mistakes and finally confessing that he preferred his father as a drunk than as a washed-up figure begging for forgiveness.
Meanwhile the other guy... (yeah, I'll check imdb later) is a teacher. This is clearly going to cause problems for me personally because I actually know something about teaching. He's an ex-MMA fighter who decided to go into a less dangerous profession, so naturally at some point during his MMA days he was getting a degree in physics and at some point after his MMA days he was taking a teacher training course to teach physics in school. Yeah, obviously. Sorry what?
In case anyone missed the sarcasm, my problem is that the script seems to suggest that teaching was a job that he quickly moved into in order to pay the bills when he gave up MMA fighting in favour of family life. But teaching isn't an easy career to just pick up.
Anyway, with the bills mounting up it looks like he and his wife are going to lose their house. This problem is not helped by a financial advisor at the bank whose top tip was apparently to remortgage the house three times. (Seriously, you didn't ever question this advice?) The wife doesn't want our joint-protagonist, brother of Tom Hardy's character, to go back into MMA fighting because if he gets a major injury they could lose everything. (Sensible lady.) But MMA fighting pays better than getting a part time job as a bouncer (which was always going to be so very practical seeing as teachers have so much free time), so rather than selling up and moving to a more affordable place, there's apparently no choice but to take part in the biggest MMA contest and try to take on some of the best talent in the business in spite of having been teaching physics rather than training in MMA for several years now....
After this teacher takes up a small MMA fight the Principle of the school takes one look at our joint protagonist's facial bruising the next day and says "I want to see you in my office". Is this because he's worried about whether the teacher was assaulted and/or mugged? Is it because he wants to know the teacher's side of the story? No, apparently he knows already. How? Well um... he never says. But you know, bruising on a teacher's face... What else could it be but an amateur MMA match? Duh! (It's made very clear that the Principle had no idea that our joint-protagonist teacher with money troubles was an ex-MMA fighter.)
Are teachers taking part in martial arts matches going against school rules? Apparently so. In fact rather than asking our teacher if he can run extra-curricular classes to share his sports knowledge with pupils at the school, our joint-protagonist is suspended indefinitely. Perhaps I'm out of touch with the American school system, but this whole plotline strikes me as utterly ludicrous.
The bigger problem with this side of the story is that it isn't that interesting, particularly by comparison with Tom Hardy's ex-military nihilistic daddy-issues stoic and stocky juggernaut. Tom Hardy is the one that spends the time with the father, he's the one that stirs up real emotions and he's the one with the more nuanced and conflicted storyline. That said, the whole "war hero" element of Tom hardy's storyline feels a little bit twee, but it just about works.
I couldn't help but feel that Tom Hardy's teacher-with-money-problems brother would have been better off as a side character. Tom Hardy's storyline felt like the real heart of the film. Still, perhaps that's my penchant for darker storytelling showing, since I couldn't help but feel that the filmmakers were expecting me to see it the other way around. While the physics teacher brother is pretty much an open book, Tom Hardy is the onion slowly peeling to give us a teary glimpse at the layers beneath. I think the intention was that we identify with the more open character and gradually come to know the contrasting enigmatic character. If that's the case, I think perhaps they shouldn't have set up the story by using Tom Hardy and Nick Nolte in the opening scene and perhaps they needed to make his physics-teacher brother rather less flat.
This is a well produced movie which knows how to pull on the heart strings and to keep the pace. Even though the story revolves around a series of fight scenes (in the second half at least) it still feels like the story is central to all of it. That said, the big montage sequence had me groaning a little bit. Unfortunately, only one of the brothers really caught my interest, making the scenes with the other brother feel like filler. I think there was another film in here that I could have really been impressed by, but in the end I cannot help but compare this to last year's "The Fighter" which really managed to make me care about everyone and which had characters who felt real. In terms of quality "The Fighter" is in a whole other league, while "Warrior" is, at best, trashy entertainment.
This was fun enough, but missing something overall.
C+
P.S. Oh, and the brother who isn't played by Tom Hardy is played by Joel Edgerton. He played a relatively important part in "Animal Kingdom", he was a fairly bland protagonist in "Kinky Boots", and that's about all I remember seeing him in.