I can say that nobody watched it because I am a film guy and not only had I never seen it but I didn't even know it existed. This is easy to have happen to a person these days because nobody watches network TV and unless they get really creative with their advertising, films are very likely to go by unnoticed by the masses even back in 2011 when this film was originally released.
Recently it popped up on Netflix's home page and I figured I would give it a look because the trailer was very well-done.
src
I don't really consider myself a fan of MMA or any fighting sport for that matter, but I do know that it exists and how brutal it is. Given the rising popularity of the sport (was that the case back in 2011? - I think so) it isn't really surprising that there would be a rather large-budget film made about it. They couldn't just make this film about some dudes trying to be MMA champions though so they had to put a twist in it.
src
The twist in this situation is that the two guys that end up being the warriors in an MMA tournament with a troubled past and their father (played by Nick Nolte) is also a wrestling expert of some sort. Tommy (Tom Hardy) and Brendon (Joel Edgerton) play the brothers that end up joining the same MMA tournament where the top prize is $5 million. Their reasons for entering are very different though.
Brendon is a high-school physics teacher who is suddenly in a bad situation financially because of a surgery that one of his daughters needed to have. He is about to lose his house and he joins the contest to make money to cover that. Tommy on the other hand seems to want to enter just because he is enraged all the time and wants to beat people up. I'm not sure about this because I skipped a lot of the dialogue scenes and just kind of filled in the blanks on my own.
src
When Brendon starts turning up to school with cuts and bruises on his face, it is found out by the school that he is fighting on an amateur level and he is suspended by the school for some reason. This all seems quite impractical to me but whatever, it is necessary for the story I guess.
I watched this film with a friend who actually is a pretty big MMA fan and he was explaining to me that the things that were happening in the ring were really unlikely to happen in real MMA. People getting thrown off the wall and tossed around the place doesn't happen very often in real fights because both fighters weight about the same or exactly the same so this is very unlikely to happen ever, he said. In Warrior this happens all the time.
src
When Brendon has to face an undefeated Russian in the semi-finals in the tournament I was thinking to myself "that guy looks familiar..." and when I saw the credits it turns out that it is WWE wrestler Kurt Angle. I always liked that guy so it is good that he is (or was) getting some work. Dude is absolutely jacked for someone his age.
There are also a bunch of other real-life MMA fighters in the film and this was probably done to try to attract fans of the UFC. Apparently it didn't work though because this film was "in and out" in the theaters and actually lost money. Maybe they are attempting to get some of that investment back by selling it to Netflix so late although I can't imagine they would pay very much for a non-blockbuster that is a decade old.
Should I watch it?
For me, a non fight fan, I found it enjoyable for different reasons than my friend, the fight fan did. He laughed at a lot of it because it was so impractical but me, not knowing much about the sport was able to enjoy it a bit more because the realism of it all wasn't really important to me because I am ignorant of these things. While we did skip though some of the sequences of dialogue that we found to be excessive at points, we both found this to be a good film although it is rather predictable what the outcome is going to be.
I think that most people will enjoy this one but you might need to have the remote in hand to skip some of the "talky bits." We found it kind of fun to look at the preview windows and just kind of guess what the story was based on that... turns out we were correct about a lot of it.
A masterpiece of screenwriting this film is not, but I think that most people will enjoy this one regardless. I know we did.
