A colleague of mine (who incidentally liked the movie) noted that Jake seems as vulnerable to hearing about his dead father as Marty McFly was to being called "chicken" - and wondered why the kid couldn't figure out that these folks were trying to get a rise out of him and ignore them.
Meanwhile, director Jeff Wadlow ( Cry_Wolf) does a serviceable job sustaining the energy level of the film both on and off the mat, but overall there's nothing at the heart of the film to distinguish this story from the countless others that have come before it. Even Hounsou, a reliably interesting performer and always compelling presence on screen, fails to inject the film with enough philosophical substance to balance out its otherwise silly high school-level rivalries. This diminishes none of the actors' individual or collective accomplishments, but without material interesting or complex enough to elevate this above that kind of cinematic stereotyping, it almost doesn't matter what they do with their roles. Additionally, the film just feels like a B-grade version of an A-list film, with Faris playing the hotheaded Tom Cruise role, Gigandet inhabiting Paul Walker's bleached-blond bad guy and Heard stepping into what might normally be Scarlett Johansson's spot as the love interest. But overall, the film gains no additional emotional or dramatic resonance as a result of employing mixed martial arts. That said, the fights are generally well-executed, and the actors do a sufficient job appearing to actually be participating in the beat downs. But as a person who looks at fighting from a cinematic perspective rather than a physical one - meaning, I don't care what the fighters do as long as it looks cool on camera - this choice means nothing to me. In recent years action movies have capitalized on new and upcoming fighting styles, including wu shu and parkour, and Never Back Down elects to use MMA for its violent aesthetic. And if you can't distinguish between or don't care about mixed martial arts, the film's intended stylistic hook, then there's really nothing here for you.
But in any case it's noteworthy to observe that virtually no mainstream movie in history that started with a shootout or fistfight has ended with an emotional or intellectual epiphany.Īs far as what the movie does, there's little that audiences haven't seen before.
Mind you, in the great calculator of movie plusses and minuses that adds up to IGN's star ratings, I'm not assigning this choice a value. After all, how many films about fighting have ever shown the constitution to suggest that the audience not do it? Even the Matrix films - which ostensibly are about the idea that Neo can literally transcend physical reality, therefore eliminating the need to fight back - resigned themselves to the fact that fans wanted to see Keanu get down and dirty. If the screenwriter, filmmakers and cast had the maturity to really follow this philosophical throughline, then Never Back Down might have become a remarkable, entertaining and even smart movie. After being humiliated at a party by Ryan, Jake solicits the training of local martial arts instructor Jean Rocha (Djimon Housou) in order to take revenge, in the process discovering that the key to victory is sometimes not fighting at all. In addition to earning him instant recognition among his schoolmates - including the fetching Baja Miller (Amber Heard) - this brings him to the attention of Ryan McCarthy (Cam Gigandet), who currently hovers at the top of the high school food chain. Upon arriving, however, it appears that most of the school already knows who Jake is thanks to a YouTube clip of the fight that got him thrown out of school back home. Sean Faris ( Sleepover) plays Jake Tyler, a high school senior who moves with his mother and younger brother Charlie (Wyatt Tyler) to Orlando, Florida to escape his troubled past. Avildsen's 1984 underdog story, nor as inventive or philosophical as David Fincher's portrait of postmodern alienation. But it's neither as single-mindedly simple as John G. A film about a bunch of teenagers locked in an epic struggle for supremacy of an underground high school fight club, it's as silly and over the top as you might expect. Never Back Down is essentially the poor man's The Karate Kid, if Karate Kid was somehow released in response to Fight Club.