REVIEW: Warrior, the Tale of Two Rockys, Packs a Potent Emotional Punch

O'Connor, whose 2004 Disney hockey pic Miracle similarly used convention and cliché to great emotional effect, overcomes the obviousness of Warrior's set-up in the best way possible: By making his archetypes into fully fleshed out characters who could conceivably carry their own individual Rocky Balboa-like stories. (Look for O'Connor in a cameo as the gazillionaire MMA enthusiast who funds the central tournament.) The dual-focus narrative, used extensively in film musicals and romance tales to make us yearn for two opposing figures to unite, works well here applied to this broken family unit even if it risks succumbing to corny convention every now and then. Even with its own Ivan Drago figure in the form of pro wrestler Kurt Angle (one of a handful of real fighters tapped for the film, including MMA fighter Erik Apple) as a silent Russian champ named Koba -- who is, refreshingly, not written as some incarnation of evil for our heroes to rally against but a totally reasonable, if stone-faced, wall of muscle -- Warrior's real villain is the specter of the past, a cocktail of bitterness, misunderstanding, and hurt that never healed.

Warrior will draw comparisons to last year's multiple Oscar-winner The Fighter, another story of dueling brothers coming to terms with each other in the world of combat sport. I'd argue that Warrior is the more affecting of the two, partly due to the fact that The Fighter is based on a true story, whereas the fictional Warrior is able to strip down to the basics of storytelling, building characters that conjure and carry ideas with them along the way. The Fighter is a great true tale/inspirational sports movie, but Warrior is good, old-fashioned storytelling that epitomizes exactly why certain conventions became conventions in the first place. And the MMA element, a curiosity at first, adds something that no boxing tale we've seen before has: The metaphorical tap-out and what it means to swallow one's pride and submit to love, as opposed to triumphing by the sheer force of a K.O.

Still, it's the cast that elevates Warrior to greatness, led by Hardy's turn as the violent, wound-up Tommy. Ever since breaking out in Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson, in which he played a real-life prison brawler in yet another wholly physical but vastly different performance, Hardy's star has skyrocketed; cast in Christopher Nolan's Inception and in the now-filming The Dark Knight Rises, the British actor is undoubtedly having a moment. Here he is a wounded child living in a Marine's body, skulking about like a feral animal ready to claw at whoever comes near. He's so damaged he must be broken by love, using the physical, fist-to-fist language of bruisers and hard men. The sight of Hardy, tattooed and muscled and drenched in blood and sweat, struggling against his instincts, in agony from years of pain and abandonment, weeping with his brother while the world watches unaware of what's really going on inside the ring -- it's the most beautiful image I've seen all year.

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