Warrior: (2011. dir: Gavin O'Connor) This is a good example of a project doomed from the start. The premise is contrived, hackneyed, gluey with sentiment, --impossible to redeem, even with the combined efforts of Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton, so much talent in one space it ought to have worked magic. And, indeed, O'Connor does enough right with it that it edges up from the Hackneyed Hogwash into Watchable But Disappointing. Hardy and Edgerton are brothers, long estranged, who both, coincidentally, enter a super-contest for Mixed Martial Arts fighting. There's also a telenovella turn with a drunken father, now sober, but still unforgiven. Knowing just that much, you can guess the script, the plot-turns, you can fill in all the blanks without having seen a frame and hit pretty close to home. One brother has a wife, well-played by Jennifer Morrison, the same thankless wife-role that women have been playing since Calpurnia tried to talk Caesar into staying home on the Ides of March. The age-old Hollywood version goes something like this: "Please, please, DON'T do this very brave thing to save our family. I love you too much to watch... but I WILL watch, because I love you even MORE now!" There's a monstrous Russian fighter, NEVER DEFEATED, a great, hulking primate of a man without a hint of humanity in him, who offers one of the several cliched challenges to the brothers' dream of achieving their five-million-dollar paycheck. (Not from greed! Not from sloth! One brother has been cheated by the bank and his house will be repossessed within three months, despite his hard work as a professor of high school physics; the other brother is an AWOL marine hero-- justifiably so, as his whole platoon was wiped out by friendly fire --who needs to provide for his dead best friend's helpless family. They are both so noble! The heart is torn! For whom to root?) Frank Grillo (Rumlow in the Captain America movies) gives an excellent performance as one brother's trainer. Nick Nolte is creditable as the disgraced paterfamilias, without doing anything unexpected, or being given anything unexpected to work with in the script, outside a Captain Ahab trope (again with the hackneyed).
Even with all the crap working against it, Hardy is so great, both in the "cage" and out, that you get sucked in. His brutality while fighting is weirdly exhilarating, and he has two other extraordinary moments: one when he tortures his sober father back into drinking again, the other when he finds him the next morning, drunk and despairing, and puts him to bed, cuddling him in an understated, childlike manner.
The movie's great downfall is that Edgerton, the physics teacher, wins match after match against insurmountable odds, but the fights are not sufficiently well-photographed to convince us that he really does deserve to win. Why does the Russian tap out, since he has NEVER BEFORE BEEN DEFEATED? I can't answer that. I'm not convinced they actually showed us why, or that the character, as presented, would have done so. He does it because the plot demands it. We all know he's going to do it, because the brothers must face off against one another, so the Russian fight is a sham, ergo completely uninteresting. Even the end-fight between the brothers is uninteresting, badly shot and edited, and it, also, feels contrived. What we're waiting for is that sentimental-hogwash embrace after the fight, when they're stumbling down the hallway with their arms around each other. That's the money-shot this movie wants us to cheer, but they cheat too much in the build-up, and so miss the target.
Oliver Twist: (2007. dir: Coky Giedroyc) We all know Oliver Twist, know him from earliest childhood. "Please, sir, I want some more." Even if you don't read the novel, you watch countless film and television versions. It's considered fare for children; they make cartoons out of it. At a young age I knew its message: that if you are good, and polite, and stand by your principles, if you have a good heart, then you will be rescued from the iniquities of life and be rewarded with wealth, comfort, and ease in the bosom of a loving family. I knew this message subconsciously before I could put it into words. How is it, then, that it's taken half a normal lifetime for me to realize that the thing is actually a hideous, classist snob-fest, the REAL message being that if you are born with blue blood in your veins, your true quality will out even if you are surrounded all your life by criminals and yobs. Symmetrically, if you have a good heart and good intentions but the wrong parentage, you are doomed to whore and thieve and betray your friends from a cowardice inherent in your character, eventually dying bloody at the hands of your abusive boyfriend. Dickens, it turns out, was kind of a dick. Do I dare revisit my childhood favorite, A Tale of Two Cities? Was that transmitting some hideous message into my unsuspecting child's brain, as well?
The dickishness of Dickens aside, Tom Hardy is the best Bill Sikes ever, absolutely understanding the cowardice involved in the psychological make-up of the bully, and the rest of the cast (Adam Arnold as the Dodger, Julian Rhind-Tutt as Monks, Sophie Okonedo as Nancy) is well-chosen. The pace is never allowed to slow in the clutches of its authors sidetracks into moral lessons, and, in spite of its political awfulness, there's a reason this story has been retold continually for centuries. You never quite know where it's going next, and the characters still have the power to move one. You even swallow the most ridiculous coincidence: the one guy Oliver gets falsely nabbed for robbing, he turns out to be his long-lost granddad? Seriously? Except that it's NOT a coincidence, because IF you are blessed with the bluish in the veins, then GOD IS ON YOUR SIDE, and no mistake.
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