Warrior

If we review recent year films we will not find much about boxing. Often, sport themed movies typically are used as an excuse to present an historical context or as an explanation of the characters background; but in any case we do not have many true films about fights.

The Boxer was a political thriller, Hurricane Carter a prison story, Cinderella Man a movie about the economic crisis of 1929, The Fighter a family portrait rather than a boxing spectacle; not to mention the big melodrama about overcoming yourself and the situations and resistance around you that Million Dollar Baby represents, but listen, there isn’t anything that brings fighting opponents in such a carnivorous way up into the ring till now.

Warrior stands out from all these titles and offers during its last hour a tribute to testosterone, strikes and blocks. It take us to the ring, it make us feel the sweat that runs through the bruised muscles of the fighters, even it transmits the tension of the dressing room, the desire to come to the final battle and defeat your opponent in the final round.

Warrior plays the paraphernalia that surrounds a boxing tournament and achieves this by taking the camera and a lot of the shots a few millimeters away from the protagonists, with a powerful soundtrack and some interpretations as worked out as the bodies of the actors. The film does not risk to end up being a male blockbuster, although in part it is: as the audience watching a fight after another, I could imagine some projection rooms full of men shouting having popcorn all over the floor. Warrior delivers what it promises; could it have really achieved more? After years of drought, Warrior serves as a Big Mac of industrial taste but very nutritive. There is nothing to object about this film.

And you might wonder: what happens in the first hour? We can say that many of the elements already mentioned before about other fighting movies fill up the first half of this film. With a very well-conceived script that reveals its facts little by little, in a way that we don’t even intuit the relationship of the two protagonists until quite late.

The backbone is the character of Nick Nolte, who achieves his best performance in a long time and who should keep on fighting. Warrior is a typical Hollywood movie, that could be considered monumental, in Hollywood standards; and to this standards you can blame many things, even some implausibility’s like a physics professor turning into a wrestler. The trick is in understanding that the Warrior constructs an environment that allows drama to grow and flow on to the surface, boasting into a visual media of visual power in the second half of the film, so that the audience leaves the room completely satisfied and happy.

Gavin O 'Connor is at his second sport film, The Miracle being the first one, forgotten story about an ice hockey team. In both cases we are dealing with average films, bombastic, with dramatic phrases and a clear and big sense of justice that rewards the characters like if we were dealing with a photo finish of their heroic physical effort.

The movie will not go down to history: the theme, this sport in specific, will have a hard time to consolidate itself among a lot of people. But please let’s not take away the films merits and main message that it can bring to its audience: play fair, never give up, fight for your dreams. This movie “hits” directly some academic film-makers that do not dare to give this kind of movies a shot, despite a nice and impeccable shooting technique, a really solid script, a great acting contribution that does not deny the greatness of a victory, going hand in hand with some slogans of big sports companies like “impossible is nothing”.

Director: Gavin O'Connor

Writers: Gavin O'Connor (screenplay), Anthony Tambakis (screenplay)

Stars: Tom Hardy, Nick Nolte and Joel Edgerton