Every film cliché ever jammed into 100 minutes

Rating: 3/10 (12 April 2008)

I liked this film better when it was called the Karate Kid. Sure, there is nothing new under the sun and every film borrows something from other films that have come before it, but this is bordering on copyright infringement.
If I had to write a Karate Kid summary in 3 sentences, this is what I would write: Kid moves to a new town. Kid gets the living crap beaten out of him by the town bad boy. Kid starts some heavy duty Karate training so he can get revenge by kicking the bad boys ass while simultaneously winning the heart of the hottest girl in town.
Now, if I had to write a summary for this film in 3 sentences it would be as follows: Kid moves to a new town. Kid gets the living crap beaten out of him by the town bad boy. Kid starts some heavy duty Mixed Martial Arts training so he can get revenge by kicking the bad boys ass while simultaneously winning the heart of the hottest girl in town.
The plot is literally exactly the same. The only difference is that when it came to the soundtrack they replaced Peter Cetera with nu metal in the vein of Linkin Park and the most pivotal characters in this film were cell phones.
People have commented that the fight scenes were pretty good. I tend to disagree. They were pretty weak. Instead of watching this film just watch the Karate Kid and have a computer handy. When the fight scenes are on in the Karate Kid, just turn away and watch some UFC fights on youtube. You'll have practically the same film as Never Back Down, just much much better.
I was surprised at the lack of tits in this film. Usually a film with a script of this caliber has a heap of tits. This was obviously an oversight from the producers and I'm sure that will be fixed if they make a sequel.
I do respect the fact that they were able to jam every 80's film cliché ever into the little over 90 minutes. When writing a film review on this site you have the option of checking the "contains spoilers" box. This feature could easily be disabled for Never Back Down. It is impossible to spoil the content of this film as everybody has already seen it, at least 1000 times, just with a different title.
Will the good kid defeat the bad kid in a no holes barred fight? Who knows? Well actually everybody.