Sub-Mental Twaddle Combined With New Age Lunacy, But Scott Mechlowicz is good!

Rating: 1/10 (27 July 2006)

I was wary about seeing this film because everything in the preview indicated I would find it insufferable, but I went to see it for one reason only and I am glad I did. The film follows a young gymnast named Dan Millman (played by Scott Mechlowicz) who is very talented, but arrogant and selfish which means he has to be knocked down a peg or two by the movies end. Through the course of Peaceful Warrior, Dan will also learn something about life, love and himself. Good luck keeping from vomiting. I failed but fortunately I had not eaten lunch, so I only had dry heaves.
Not only does Peaceful Warrior espouse a philosophy no deeper than your average Chinese Restaurant fortune cookie, but it adds a level of mystical New Age crap on top that truly pushes the film into the realm of the insulting. Here's an example of a great truth according to the film, "the hardest people to love are the ones who need love the most". Right, like Adolf Hitler and Jeffrey Dahmer.
Apparently, our gymnast hero Dan Millman (who already has a coach who is dedicated and caring) has not learned such basic things like the importance of focusing your mind on your immediate task when doing a complicated gymnastics routine. Dan has to get this nugget of wisdom from a grizzled old gas station attendant (played by a grizzled old Nick Nolte) who appears out of the night mist at a service station and may actually exist only in Dan's mind.
There is nothing wrong with stories about people overcoming great odds and succeeding despite handicaps. Stories like that should be wonderful and inspiring but all too often they are just depressing and full of boneheaded, limp platitudes that offer nothing in the way of insight. This film is supposed to be inspired by real events and I don't doubt that the real Dan Millman overcoming a severely broken leg to get back up and become successful at gymnastics was not a great feat. But what is all of this "way of the warrior" crap? I immediately thought of the guys from Murderball and how none of them needed a fuzzy brained guru named Socrates to succeed and recover. They did it the natural way, with human brains, sweat, hard work and the help of family and friends.
Nick Nolte's phantom-like character appears just when our hero Dan has been having a spell of bad dreams, such as having his ankle shatter in to a million pieces of frozen chicken breast. Then, like Yoda chairing an AA meeting, he spouts fanciful parables and nonsense blather about "taking out the mental trash" and being "in the moment". Socrates (as Dan calls him which is an insult to the real Socrates) even advocates not thinking of the future or the past, as if that were good advice! Think about that for a second. If you never think of the past or the future then you are living like Guy Pearce did in the film Memento. Yeah, that's an improvement.
Focusing on the here and now is generally good advice, but our guru has to toss poor Danny off a bridge into a creek for him to learn that. "Your mind was focused on only one thing while you were falling", Socrates tells him, "you even had a word for it, "Ahhhh!" Do you imagine the poor people who jumped from the World Trade Center were very focused? I don't think so. I'm sure they each had a lot of very different feelings and emotions going through their minds. Too bad they couldn't be as disciplined as our gymnast hero and his flaky gas jockey guru. They might have died happy.
Still, despite the psychobabble and sub-mental twaddle that passes for insight, Scott Mechlowicz makes this a tolerable film. He is a young actor to watch. With his slender physique and expressive face, he seems to be able to run a gamut of emotion. He was unique among the cast of Mean Creek in that he was simultaneously the most menacing of the boys, but also the one you felt most sorry for. He was delightfully goofy in EuroTrip and he seems to be an actor of good range and he is cute as hell. He will get better looking as he gets older and I don't think we've seen all that this guy can do. I hope he's in more comedies, but I will see almost anything he's in. He is the only reason I stayed to watch this film until the end.