Review: 'Warrior' is nothing short of a masterpiece

Film: Warrior
Director: Gavin O'Connor
Cast: Joel Edgerton, Tom Hardy, Jennifer Morrison, Nick Nolte, Kurt Angle
Rating: ****

Warrior, with its references to Moby Dick, may well have opened with Tolstoy's quote about unhappy families.

When the saturnine hulking Irish-American ex-Marine Tommy Riordan turns up on his estranged father Paddy's (Nolte) doorstep, it is not to reconcile with the man whose alcohol problem wrought damage and pain on his mother, but to establish a strictly professional trainer-trainee relationship.

Tommy is revving up for an upcoming recently instituted tournament Sparta which is touted to be the 'Superbowl of Mixed martial arts' which offers the victor a reward unprecedented in the sport, and the contest, by nature, presents a heightened sense of unpredictability in the outcome. Paddy, who has put a leash on his old passions, can't get his son to respect him, much less love him.

Elsewhere, a down and out school physics teacher Brendan Conlon (Edgerton), waist-deep in financial problems, is suspended after it is discovered that he moonlighted as a fighter in a seedy strip club. With the dreaded prospect of losing his house becoming a reality day by day, the strapped-for-cash teacher sets his sights on the prize. Though his wife, recalling his endeavours from his former life as a fighter, won't have any of it, he teams up with an unconventional trainer who lays it all on the line to see his underdog through.

Tommy, as it turns out, isn't as one dimensional as we thought he was. Though he is pretty much a destructive force of nature in human guise, his thirst to win the tournament stems from the desire to hand over the prize money to the widow of a fallen comrade.

With a viral video of him doing the rounds online, the media soon laps up everything to do with Tommy, whose antecedents are shrouded in mystery. And while the brute slams his way past equally brutish, though less skillful opponents, the obscure Brendan slips under the radar, gaining one hard-fraught victory at a time.

Well, as it turns out, Tommy and Brendan are brothers, and they resent each other as deeply as they resent their old man. Eventually, a confrontation between the two, who stand to lose everything dear to them, appears to seem inevitable.

Warrior masterfully eschews the clichés and corniness of combat sports movies with a story more muscle-bound than its players. With Hollywood trying to peddle faux kitchen-sink realism, Warrior sets its self apart with genuinely deep and gripping drama and it is the rock-solid acting capabilities of its actors transfer a sense of immediacy to the audience almost flawlessly. Inside and out of the ring, Hardy, Edgerton and Nolte pull off a phenomenal job as a family ripped apart at the seams. Nolte as Paddy who listens to Herman Melville on tape (like everyone else in the film is chasing his own white whale - the grace of his progeny) is particularly brilliant.

Seldom has family dynamics been so adeptly handled in any film, let alone one ostensibly concerned about mixed martial arts, a barbaric sporting endeavour where pretty much no holds are barred. Which brings us to the fights scenes. Well shot and frantic, no doubt, but having violence explode in front of an adulating camera was hardly the film's point.

Go for Warrior if you want a film with great character development, suspense that will have you at the edge of your seat and brilliant acting that brings to life a nuanced screenplay