Knowing the twists and turns a story is going to take isn't always a bad thing. There can be a simple pleasure in watching a familiar story retold, and told well. Silver Linings Playbook did that last year, working to the structure of Rocky, but with added mental health issues. (Not that big a change considering Rocky often came across like he was one hit away from life in a wheelchair.) Warrior's tweak to the underdog movie structure is to have not one, but two Rockys: played by Joel Edgerton and Tom Hardy. Not only are their characters both underdogs, coming out of nowhere to take a shot at a purse of 5 million dollars in a mixed martial arts tournament, but (CUE VOICEOVER MAN) they're also brothers!
There's nothing in Warrior that will surprise you: the estrangement between the two brothers, the conflicted and acrimonious relationship between them and their father (the ever-gnarled and grizzled Nick Nolte), Edgerton's mounting mortgage repayments, Hardy's personal debt that he has to honour; all of it is very much by the numbers for the genre. The reason the film's worth highlighting is that it does it all so well. The principals might not look like family, but the physicality with which they imbue their characters comes from the same place; as does their bullheaded willful approach to life, in and out of the ring. It'd be easy to imagine the film lazily recast with Jason Statham and The Rock as stepbrothers, and Bruce Willis as the paterfamilias; and that's the film most people take Warrior to be.
It's not like the film flopped or went unseen - a good few people rushed out to see it, but that was the crowd that was already hooked on the idea of one large man hitting an even larger man. Warrior deserves an audience outside of UFC and MMA aficionados. The fights are impressive, brutalising, and adrenaline inducing - but the reason I was grabbing hold of my seat and wrenching against it, willing Hardy to survive another round/hoping that Edgerton would manage to get up despite the beating he'd taken, was because I cared. I wasn't caught up in it because of the violence; I was caught up in it because of the script, the directing, and the performances.
It doesn't surprise, but it doesn't have to. Sometimes a film just has to pull you in.
Overall: 8.5/10
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