Warrior

It’s not the punches and kicks that weigh so hard upon us in Warrior, it’s being stuck in a lose-lose situation in which you’re rooting for both of the characters to succeed and to win the fight, and praying that some outcome will allow for that to happen. Sure, Warrior leans heavily upon cliché characters tropes and story beats, but it also manages to expand beyond those basic sketches and create a real investment in what happens to these people. Sports films are hard, either you’re indentured to make a victory feel loaded with symbolic weight, or give us a rooting everyman who is really but a blank cipher that allows us to live out our wildest fantasies of rising to a challenge and succeeding beyond belief, but very rarely do they extend beyond these faint ideals to impart real tension and a sense of something at stake here.

Which is Warrior is so damn satisfying. It cloaks the sports drama behind an emotionally gripping story of two estranged brothers trying to make peace with each other and their recovering alcoholic father. The story leans harder on its themes of redemption, making peace with the past, reconciliation and forgiveness than it does on montages of training or spending long periods of time in the ring. We want both of these brothers, who rise up from dark horse candidates to eventually having to fight each other for the title, to win, to find some kind of inner peace and access to a better tomorrow. It doesn’t really matter which one wins out in the end, what matters more is that they manage to work out their issues and come together. That’s what makes the closing shot so satisfying.

But a script can only go so far into making us care about these characters, they still need to be brought to life and made real. And Warrior’s three leading roles are expertly played by Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton, and Nick Nolte. Nolte seems to excel in these kind of roles: damaged men trying valiantly to regain their footing, or crushed with guilt and tortured by their past. Nolte’s alcoholic father begging for a second chance sounds like a villainous role, but the film extends a sympathetic viewpoint towards him as it shows his guilt weighing heavily upon his soul and desperate to try and make things right. Hardy and Edgerton are equally compelling and evenly matched as the brothers. Edgerton is a particularly underrated actor. He’s one of the few bright spots in The Great Gatsby, solid in Animal Kingdom, and brings tremendous amount of emotional weight to his small role in Zero Dark Thirty. It’s nice to see him get a main role here and demonstrate his full talents. Hardy is an actor I’ve long been a fan of, he’s a standout in the solid ensemble of Inception, menacing in The Dark Knight Rises, and a confused agent in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, all performances that I’ve enjoyed. Here he does his best variation on Brando in On the Waterfront and finds the vulnerability in this man. His relationship between him and his father is one of more fascinating and slowly evolving aspects of the film.