A straight genre picture,

Rating: 7/10 (6 March 2015)

"Warrior" wants to be a great sports movie so badly, so desperately, that it loses touch with what I suspect it was supposed to be about all along. Theoretically speaking, everything you could possibly want from an inspirational-but-grounded sports movie is here: Brooding themes of brotherhood, redemption and guilt; a scrappy underdog beating the odds; the indestructible, Ivan Drago-like combatant who looms for our heroes (they've even made him Russian here, despite the fact that he's played by U.S. Olympic Gold Medalist Kurt Angle); and of course the Big Competition at the end, in which all the plot lines are wrapped up in a single-elimination tournament. A lot of this works; director Gavin O'Connor ("Miracle") knows his sports movie tropes well, and how to hit them to maximize their impact. But by focusing too much on the sports movie conventions and not enough on the movie itself, it doesn't punch us in the gut at the end the way it should. It's a lot of impressively empty theater.