Made-in-Pittsburgh 'Warrior' layers brutality with tale of family heartbreak and redemption
-
Tom Hardy, left, and Joel Edgerton star as brothers Tommy and Brendan in "Warrior." -
Nick Nolte stars as 'Paddy' in 'Warrior.'
Share with others:
Tommy doesn't pull his punches in the boxing ring, mixed martial arts cage or conversations with his father.
Resentment, anger and disgust have hardened like calluses on Tommy (Tom Hardy), back in his hometown of Pittsburgh for the first time in years. "I think I liked you better when you were a drunk," he tells his dad, retired steelworker Paddy (Nick Nolte), who is on the brink of 1,000 days sober.
Tommy and his long-suffering mother fled Pittsburgh and the one-time drunken, abusive Paddy. Now he's returned to the home where he and brother Brendan (Joel Edgerton) grew up. Brendan is a physics teacher in Philadelphia, married to his high school sweetheart and the doting father of two daughters.
- Starring: Joel Edgerton, Tom Hardy, Nick Nolte.
- Rating: PG-13 for sequences of intense mixed martial arts fighting, some language and thematic material.
For reasons as contrived as they are compelling, Tommy starts to train for a $5 million winner-take-all MMA tournament called Sparta and so does Brendan. Neither knows the other is trying to make it to Atlantic City and win the biggest purse the sport has ever seen.
"Warrior" tracks the men's physical and emotional journeys -- and reasons for being willing to climb into a cage and be beaten, pounded, slammed and nearly choked to death -- in a story with biblical overtones. One brother must die, symbolically rather than physically, so he can be reborn.
But, at its heart, it's a rousing story with three men fighting their way back to family, brotherhood and promises made and kept. It manages to figure out a way to make a winner a winner and a loser a winner, and to tap into the country's dismal economic climate.
Brendan, facing the loss of his house, asks his banker, "My wife and I have three jobs between us. That doesn't cut it, so what do you suggest?" It's Brendan who comes up with a possible, punishing solution to his money woes as the movie marches toward Sparta as if it were a compressed Olympics or Super Bowl.
You don't need to know the rules of mixed martial arts to appreciate "Warrior," which is a good thing because director and co-writer Gavin O'Connor provides almost none.
You may divine that when a fighter taps on the mat or his opponent or verbally submits, he's surrendering. In a movie that runs 139 minutes, there should have been time to squeeze in a sentence or two outlining the bare-bones rules.
"Warrior" originally was targeted for a fall 2010 release and was postponed, in part, to avoid competing against "The Fighter," which earned Oscars for Christian Bale and Melissa Leo. The performers Mr. O'Connor cast and brought to Pittsburgh in 2009 are no longer the largely unrecognizable actors he sought.
First Published September 9, 2011 12:00 am
