Worthwhile melodrama

Rating: 7/10 (4 April 2012)

The movie industry has collected its fair share of boxing films, but not quite as many MMA, mixed martial arts, films. Especially not one with the kind of star power that is behind Warrior. The film follows two brothers who have been distant all their lives and it tells the story of how an MMA tournament brought them back together. It's got a mixture of hard hitting brutality and a soft spot of emotional prowess. It's a story of family set on the stage of organized fighting, only this stage is octagon shaped.
Warrior sports an excellent cast with three very strong leads, Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton, and Nick Nolte who was Oscar nominated for his powerhouse performance as the father of Hardy and Edgerton's characters. It's a character driven film that thrives on the relationships between these three main characters. Edgerton, Hardy, and Nolte play Brendan, Tommy, and Paddy Conlon respectively and their relationships form the plot of this film. The film opens with Tommy returning home to his father, who ends up becoming his trainer, as Tommy wants to get back into fighting. Meanwhile, Brendan is living a quiet life has a high school physics teacher, completely detached from his brother and resentful of his father. However, when his financial situations puts his own house in jeopardy he decides to return to his roots and try to win the prize money from the MMA competition that his brother has also signed up for. What results is a powerful, emotional, and somewhat over-the-top story.
Warrior is one of those films that screams melodrama at points, but still manages to tell an engaging enough story to be interesting and well worth the watch. We've seen this story of broken family and detached brotherhood plenty of times before, just not in the context of MMA fighters, and that's what makes Warrior a worthwhile film that is enthralling to the end and packs enough of a punch, both physically and emotionally, to really stick with you. It's not a film I would watch again and it probably isn't something I'll rave about for months and months, but there's really no reason to skip over it because, overall, it is a great drama that doesn't have too much to offer, but what it does deliver is plenty respectable.