Warrior (2011) Dir: Gavin O'Connor

Sports drama is an odd genre, the movies tending to be either great or dreadful.
You know, for every Rocky there's a Rocky V, for every The Wrestler there's a Jerry fucking Maguire.

The plot:
Separately, two brothers of an alcoholic former boxer begin training to compete in a Mixed Martial Arts competition, a winner takes all event where the victorious man will walk away with a cool $5,000,000.
One brother, Brendan, is a school teacher, with a wife and two daughters, caught in a blizzard of financial woes that see him heading back to the cages.
The second, Tommy, is a former marine, recently back from Iraq where something extraordinary took place that will either be the making or the breaking of him.
Neither brother has forgiven their father for his drunken ways, with blame laid at his door for their mother's early death and, crucially, the brothers themselves have not spoken in years.
So, when the pair of them wind up in the same competition, any bets on how this movie might end?

And there lies one of the problems. Right from the get-go, we know the final scene, could in fact have written it ourselves and, just as the movie reached it's zenith, I found myself urging the writers not to screw it up. Keep the darkness, I was thinking, don't do the obvious.
And then they did.
Add into that the fact that the 'family strife' is very much of soap opera standard, though perhaps not quite as shouty and over-wrought, and we have the makings for a disaster.
But.
But....
Then there are the cage fighting sequences, which are simply extraordinary. Forget the wanton excesses of Stallone's battered and bruised Balboa, all Hollywood sucker punches and human-impossible upper cuts, the violence here seems real for the most part, with only one lapse into silliness that I noted. The director does a fine job of dragging the viewer right into the action so that, at times, you almost feel the elbows smashing into cheekbones and eye sockets being fractured.
So, a mixed bag, with performances that are sure to get it the odd Oscar nod come February, breath-taking fight scenes and needless family melodrama.
Overall verdict?
Family drama guff: 1 out of 5
Fight sequences: 5 out of 5
Averaging out to a straight 3 out of 5