Butler's Cinema Scene

“WARRIOR” My rating: B (Opening wide on Sept. 11)

139 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

In outline there’s nothing terribly original about “Warrior,” which follows the well-tested dictates of your typical “fight” movie.

You’ve got your training montage. You’ve got your chatty TV sportscasters giving us the blow-by-blow even as we’re watching the bout unfold before our eyes. You’ve got your dramas outside the ring spilling over into the brawl inside the ring.

Happily this melodrama from writer/director Gavin O’Connor tosses in a few welcome changeups. And it’s been so well acted that even the familiar somehow seems fresh.

At heart “Warrior” is the story of a fractured family somehow coming together in the fury of a mixed martial arts tournament.

Tommy Conlon (Tom Hardy) returns to his blue-collar home town after an absence of nearly 15 years. He’s an angry young man who has come to heap scorn on his abusive father, Paddy (Nick Nolte), a boxing coach whose drunken fury and womanizing drove away Tommy and his mother years ago.

Tommy is looking for revenge (his mother has since died) and is actually disappointed to discover that his once-combative dad is now on the wagon and contrite about his decades of bad behavior.

The best Tommy can do is toss out withering barbs. When Paddy reports that he’s now celibate, Tommy shrugs: “It’s hard to find a girl who can take a punch nowadays.”

Meanwhile Tommy’s older brother Brendan (Joel Edgerton), who remained with Paddy when the family broke up, is the father of two young girls and struggling to get by on a high school teacher’s pay. On weekends he tries to pick up modest purses as a mixed martial arts club fighter.

Told his mortgage is upside down and he should declare bankruptcy, Brendan replies “That’s not how I do things.”

For both brothers the answer is to sign up for a mixed martial arts tournament with a $5 million purse.

Tommy suspends his hatred of Paddy just enough to allow the old man to train him. Brendan is coached by an old friend (Frank Grillo).

Brothers Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton square off

You needn’t have studied screenwriting to figure that it will all boil down to a sibling slugfest.

The cliches fly as furiously as the punches (there’s even an “unbeatable” Russian fighter who will have to be vanquished if both brothers are to make it to the championship bout…shades of “Rocky IV”!).

But the triumvirate of Hardy (he was the weapons expert in “Inception”), Edgerton (“King Arthur,” “The Square”) and veteran Nolte is simply terrific.

Hardy is mesmerizing and quietly compelling as the angry, brooding Tommy; this performance, filled with animal intensity,  will make him a star.

Edgerton pulls off the not inconsiderable trick of making a nice guy seem interesting. And Nolte is very nearly heartbreaking as a man so ashamed of his past that he’ll allow himself to be his son’s emotional punching bag.

(By the way, both Edgerton and Hardy are from the UK…you wouldn’t know it from these peformances.)

I’m no MMA expert, but the fight scenes look authentic enough and build in intensity until the final fraternal bashfest practically burns up the screen.

Visually the film perfectly captures its gritty, working-class setting (it appears to have been filmed in shades of dirt).

| Robert W. Butler