uninspired Karate Kid knock-off

Rating: 4/10 (27 March 2009)

"Never Back Down" takes place in one of those only-in-the-movies high schools where the students spend so much of their time partying, brawling and posting videos of themselves on the internet that they have no time left over for studying.
Jake Tyler is the football hero with the stereotypical name who reluctantly moves from Iowa to Orlando, Florida with his mother and kid brother after the death of his father. Jake has trouble adjusting to life in his new school where the law of the jungle clearly predominates and where the favorite extracurricular activity consists of beating one another senseless between classes. That survival-of-the-fittest mentality is further reinforced by a sort of underground fight club whose existence is apparently known to everyone on campus except for the clueless faculty who seem utterly oblivious to all the black eyes and bruised faces that keep popping up in their classrooms on an almost daily basis. But then what can one expect from a school in which the girls all dress like streetwalkers and the boys are all granite-jawed jocks who are suffering from a major case of testosterone-overload?
This cheapjack rip-off of "The Karate Kid" even boasts its own version of Mr. Miyagi - a character-building mixed martial arts teacher who takes Jake under his wing, imparting two-bit life lessons while he instructs his pupil in the fine art of how not to get his butt kicked at school.
The movie adheres to every single cliché endemic to the genre, including an arch villain whose super hot girlfriend switches her allegiance to the sensitive, misunderstood hero when it suddenly dawns on her what an irredeemable cad her boyfriend truly is. And all this is done to a surfeit of fighter-in-training montage sequences backed by a generic rock soundtrack.
Sean Faris has sufficient charisma to make us care about Jake, and the always splendid Djimon Hounsou brings some much needed gravitas to the proceedings as the philosophy-spouting mentor. But the movie, as a whole, is just way too formulaic to engage our interest much beyond the ferocious and well executed fight scenes.
If you're hankering for a genuinely great teen drama, check out the latest installment of "Friday Night Lights" and skip "Never Back Down" altogether.