Kick! Punch! It's all in the mind. If you wanna test me I'm sure you'll find, the things I teach ya are sure to beat ya, nevertheless get a lesson from teacher.....

Rating: 4/10 (20 August 2008)

Hiyah! Never Back Down as a MMA movie is weak, flat out. For anyone who's done any sort of MMA training and has decent taste in movies, you should easily realize this is just MMA MTV style. There's nothing about it. Show hot chicks, show flashy cars, show lubed up dudes, and the melodramatic back stories that everyone is pretty much bored with by now.
The movie isn't completely awful, the dude who plays the "badboy" actually has some decent charisma. He reminded me of Paul Walker and Brad Pitt combined. Obviously Djimon(sp?) can act, so that's no surprise, but one thing he can't do is fight. His form was very amateur. And that's another thing that was poorly done with this film; the training for the actors. The kicks for our acting stars were beyond bad. Whoever trained the stand-up for this movie should be laughed at. I can't really make fun of the grappling, since the editing was so ridiculously fast. One second no submission, the next a knee bar...what? Huh?
With what I said above with how flashy it is, it's by far the biggest reason you'll keep watching. Not a single person is ugly in this movie, not a crappy car is seen in sight, and I think I saw a dog take a turd that was CGI'd with "bling" on it....I think. I was hoping it'd be so bad that MST3K would one day bash on it, and maybe they will, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It's just a movie that was made for the MMA craze, predictable and hip as humanly possible. Check out Red Belt instead.