Clichéd sports movie with some good points

Rating: 6/10 (9 February 2012)

A very cliché sports story, with so many corny moments that you'll have seen in six dozen other films that it becomes ludicrous long before its end. Yet, in some ways, it's pretty well done, and it nearly overcomes those clichés. Joel Edgerton and Tom Hardy play two brothers who parted ways way back when they were teenagers. Hardy went away with his mother and later joined the Marines after she passed away. Now he has returned to his father (Nick Nolte), a former drunk who drove his family apart. Edgerton didn't like his father much, either, but chose not to go with his brother and mother because he was in love with the woman he would eventually marry (Jennifer Morrison). Both brothers are skilled fighters and have their eyes set on the big prize in a mixed martial arts tournament. The film somewhat succeeds because it's very low-key. Most of the time, it's hard to notice how melodramatic and predictable the story is. The performances help, too (Joel Edgerton was my favorite of the three big characters). After a while, though, we get stuff like a wife who refuses to watch the fight impatiently pacing behind her cell phone, on a table in the foreground, waiting for a call to tell her her husband has won a match. And Hardy's story is beyond ridiculous - he gets invited to the tournament after beating up a trained MMA champion in a local gym - never mind that Hardy, at best, was just a trained wrestler many years ago in high school. Being in the Marines does not give you superpowers. That's just the start of the ridiculousness that ends up, obviously, with the two brothers fighting in the ring (with Edgerton's wife, at this point, of course watching from ringside). I should probably call Gavin O'Connor one of the best directors of the year, because, as over-the-top as all this stuff is (and, believe me, I barely scratched the surface - the movie runs for 2 hours and 20 minutes), it generally doesn't feel that way. If one doesn't look too closely at it, I could imagine it seeming great. But it's not.