Warrior

   Warrior is another movie from 2011 that I never got a chance to catch up with until last weekend.  It's a violent and fresh take on a fairly familiar story.  Hollywood loves producing boxing movies.  I think I read somewhere that boxing far surpasses any other sport seen on film.  This movie isn't about boxing, it is about mixed martial arts (MMA).  Tom Hardy (Bronson, Inception, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy) plays Tommy, a hardened war veteran and former high-school wrestling star who has been estranged from his brother and father for years.  Joel Edgerton (Animal Kingdom) plays Brendan, Tommy's older brother, who is a school teacher and former MMA fighter struggling to pay the bills and is about 3 months away from losing his house to foreclosure.  Both men have aspects of their lives that need reparation. And both men have a fractured relationship with their father, played with tremendous believability by Nick Nolte, who is a recovering alcoholic trying to regain the trust of his family that he has lost through his addiction.  I'm not giving anything away by telling you that both brothers enter a $5 million MMA tournament and end up in the final fight against one another.  What I won't tell you is who wins the fight (I will say that it doesn't end in a tie).  I literally had no idea which brother was going to win in the end and part of me was rooting for each of them to come out on top.
   Hardy brings a character to the screen that is downright terrifying.  He doesn't accept sponsors, doesn't have walk-out music, won't look opponents in the eye before the opening bell, wins matches with a single punch, then immediately flings open the gate and walks back into the locker room before the referee can finish the 10-count.   Brendan, on the other hand, is a washed-up submission style fighter who is purely in it to get money to save his family from losing their home.  He does not have the muscle of his brother but he has a litany of submission holds that he puts opponents in and gets them to tap out in defeat.  Two totally different styles of fighters come together in a suspenseful and devastating final sequence.  The physicality of these fighting performances is unlike anything I've ever seen in cinema before.
   Nolte is as senescent as they come.  Age has weathered his face and strained his vocal chords, which makes his performance that much more believable and honest.  You know this isn't just another fighting movie when the opening scene drops you right in the middle of a sarcastic and accusatory dialogue between Tommy and his father.  We find out that Tommy has been away for quite a long time and he asks his father whether he has a woman in his life or not.  His father says that he does not, prompting Tommy to reply, "it must be hard to find a woman who can take a punch nowadays."  Nolte has a few scenes like this with Hardy that are quite spectacular, most notably one they have in front of slot machine.  Hardy says things to his father that no man should ever have to hear from his son - but we get the feeling that he deserves every bit of it.
   Warrior worked for me on every level.  The fight scenes are as real and violent as they come, with no glitz or glamor to take you out of the moment.  The announcers are even good, especially when they stop announcing for much of the final fight.  We are left to provide the fight commentary on our own.  Hardy's an animal, Edgerton's a force, Nolte's back in old form.  Warrior is the ultimate story of redemption; of how certain peripheral events can heal the wounds of a broken family.