transcends the sports movie cliché

Rating: 9/10 (14 September 2011)

After seeing this movie, I had a hard time explaining why I like it so much. I don't like predictable movies, especially sports ones. I don't like movies that are full of cliché. Warrior is a sports movie that revels in the cliché. But I LOVED it.
There are a few different reasons this movie stands out. First of all, the acting is ridiculously good. The two leads, Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton, were convincing not only as MMA fighters, but as three- dimensional human beings. And Nick Nolte is great as the brothers' newly sober father. Second, instead of being a sports movie, it's a good movie with a sport in it. If you went into this movie without knowing anything about it, you wouldn't realize it was a fight movie until about half an hour in. It builds up the characters perfectly, so that when they fight, the viewer is completely invested in them.
And when the movie finally reaches the big tournament at the end, the fights are awesome. It actually kind of shows the different styles going into MMA, where one brother is just a giant physical force, while the other is more about technique. The scenes were a little too heavily edited for my taste, but I could ignore it because I was invested in the outcomes of the fights.
I honestly can't think of many people that wouldn't like this movie. It didn't do too great at the box office, but hopefully word-of-mouth will get more people to see it this weekend.