A beast in man tamed by financial motivation and family values

Rating: 7/10 (10 April 2015)

Over the course of history we saw a great lot of the fight movies. There was Bloodsport and Rocky, Million Dollar Baby and The Fighter. In all these movies there were the heroes, each of them having their own reasons to keep going, to keep fighting. Fighting for their friends, for their pride, for the sake of proving themselves, for their dreams. Or at least for some vain glory. Those heroes were facing the improbable odds, the unbeatable foes - and the only thing that made them victorious was their motivation, their goal.
Warrior, a new member of the fight film family, tries to play it right, play it modern. No more black and white, good and evil, righteous and deceitful. It brews a nice steaming pot of conflict, adds the characters, each twisted and flawed in their own way, spices it all with a dark prehistory that connects them together, and finally boils it all down to a burning mix of action, emotions and adrenaline that keeps you on the edge of your seat, both teeth and fists clenched. Sounds like a perfect game, right?
Indeed, seconds after the credits start rolling, accompanied by that mighty blockbusterized Beethoven theme, when your head is still hot and your armpits sweating from all the fighting you imagined yourself being a part of, i'm sure you wanna say that you just saw one of the best, if not THE best fight movie of all times. And yes, in terms of the action and the tension that was continuously building up towards the climax, Warrior does hit well above par. Much higher than the same Million Dollar Baby where the last third of the movie gives you almost no action at all, letting your steam cool off and leaving you confused and unsatisfied. But thankfully Warrior is our hero tonight, and we should be grateful for that unparalleled and non-compromising feeling it gave us.
Hovewer, if we too do it right and modern and dig one layer deeper, the things we uncover might be quite a surprise. Because it turns out that Warrior played a very unlikely, almost a cynical trick on us: it sold us the movie where a man is made a hero for fighting over... money.
After all, who are our protagonists? Two brothers with a dark shadow of the past lying between them and the father figure looming in that shadow.
There's Tommy, the younger one, cast away and left alone to take care of his dying mother. Who lives for one goal - one dictated by his own honor and responsibility. A beast in a human form who's willing to kill and die for that goal. Whose only brethren are those who've gone through literal hell shoulder to shoulder with him. And there's Brendan, the older one, who used to be envious for his father's love to his sibling. Who changed loyalty to his kin for a girl's love and became a happy family man, with a wife, two kid daughters and a job as a school teacher. The only thing he doesn't have is a money to pay for his mortgage.
The stories of both brothers are hard and dramatic. But for the first time in the fight movie genre, the cause of providing for a dead friend's family is antagonized by a personal housing crisis. Nobody's dying in Brendan's family, he simply refuses to move to a smaller house or an apartment because it's a personal matter to him. Yet from the get-go we are almost forced into rooting for Brendan. He has more screen time, he's shown as a good husband and a loving father. Even his school students seem to adore him. While Tommy is portrayed as an abusive and aggressive chaotic pill-eater and alcohol-drinker, who has no place in this life to call his own, no person to call his friend, no love neither for his father nor his brother. Just an animal at large, roaming around and trying to survive somehow.
One might think that Nick Nolte's character of Paddy, an alcoholic-turned-sober father, who's equally rejected by both of his sons for his actions in the past and who now finds refuge in the "Moby Dick" audiobook, could become a bridge between Brendan and Tommy and between their causes. Indeed, up until some point there was hope in it, and Paddy's attempts to mend what's been broken felt most sincere and endearing.
But the director and co-writer Gavin O'Connor never dared to sail as far and deep as Herman Melville did. And when the contract between the outcome of the Captain Ahab vs Moby Dick confrontation and the prescribed ending of the film itself became too obvious to ignore, Paddy was comfortably written off without any reasonable explanation whatsoever, to be reduced to a distant and wordless part of the setting.
After that cowardly transformation we are left face to face with the predictable ending that's been built for us through the whole movie. The good husband and a loving father wins, the animal in a human form loses. And with that a new moral testament is written down in the history of the fight movie genre: that no matter how improbable are your odds and how uncrushable your foes seem, you're bound to win if you have a wife, kids and, most importantly, a mortgage to pay. Because the modern American hero must live by the family values and never inflict loss to financial institutions.
And the rest... the rest is negligible.