Warrior has great fight scenes! Gavin O’Connor is a marvelous director with a real flair for capturing action. The fight scenes in Warrior absolutely put to shame the CGI-laden, sped-up, craptastic “fighting” found in the action films of the last decade. And as far as the fighting in recent “fight movies” goes, I can tell you that Cinderella Man and The Fighter look positively feeble compared to the action in Warrior. When you are through watching this movie, you will feel like you have been fighting in the tournament! I felt like I needed a massage afterword, I found the whole experience so intense.

So the fighting is good. Really good! What about the rest of the movie? Well frankly, it’s a bit grim and a bit unbelievable. O’Conner’s characters are not big talkers, which is probably pretty realistic given that they are cage-fighters, but watching them grunt and mope around does not help frame the story coherently. Tommy is a stone-cold sociopath. His brother is a desperate man, fighting to keep his house. They are both complete nobodies yet they somehow get into “Sparta”, this big, world-wide prize fighting tournament. They both enter it on these completely grandiose missions. It all feels a bit slapped together. No time is spent on their training. No time is spent on explaining why Tommy is so weird. They make a point that both brothers hate the father, but they never go any deeper than the surface. Let’s face it, all the effort in making Warrior was focused on capturing mixed martial arts fighting on film.

Rather than go on and on about the problems with the story, let’s just consider one example: How on earth does the physics teacher do so well in the tournament? (It’s clear from the preview that he makes it to the final, so I’m not giving anything away.) This is completely unexplained. You are left with the following hypothesis: it is a combination of 1) the father having trained him (as a teenager) really, really well as a wrestler, and 2) the fact that he had a really great and innovative trainer to help him prepare for this event, and 3) he has tremendous heart because he is fighting for his family. I would argue that 3) is a bit over-rated, given his opponents have spent their entire lives training to physically decimate people. You might think 1) was compelling, but I believe that the big Russian he fights was supposed to be a Olympic gold-medal wrestler, and he outweighed the physics teacher by about 100 lbs, so it’s tough to believe that the physics teacher’s wrestling prowess got him through. As for his trainer, this might have been an okay storyline if it was done well, but we are not shown anything compelling about his training, except hearing the refrains “breathe!” and “Beethoven!” over and over. Okay, fine, “Beethoven”, I get it – the guy remained calm and was intelligent in the ring.  But I still don’t believe that he would not have gotten his head ripped off by that big Russian. So you might be thrilled watching the fight scenes, but in the end you can’t escape the feeling that you have not watched anything remotely connected to reality.

See Warrior if you want to marvel at a stunning craftsmanship of fight scenes. Just don’t expect to take to much else away from this film.

And as a final note, I wish Gavin O’Conner would return to making films more like his masterpiece, Tumbleweeds. Along these lines, I remember seeing on IMDB a couple of years ago that he had a film in pre-production with the storyline of a Harvard student who drops out or flunks out, and winds up going on the road with this father’s punk rock band. Now that’s a film I would love to see! Unfortunately it is no longer listed on IMDB at all, so I assume it fell through. Dear Gavin: please, please make this film somehow! We have enough ridiculously violent films to choose from these days.