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DVD REVIEW

Warrior *****
Directed by: Gavin O’Connor
Starring: Tom Hardy; Joel Edgerton; Jennifer Morrison; Nick Nolte; Frank Grillo

 

Killer Elite ***
Directed by: Gary McKendry
Starring: Jason Statham; Clive Owen; Yvonne Strahovski; Robert De Niro; Dominic Purcell

This week’s films are so manly, you’ll probably have to shave the disc before putting into your player. In fact, the only way either Warrior or Killer Elite could be more heavingly masculine is if Chuck Norris used his beard to engrave the disc with the image of himself round-housing an enraged warthog.
Before I begin with Warrior, however, a confession. I am a gigantic mixed martial arts nerd. I am almost Statto-like in my slavish fandom of the sport and duly tough to impress when it comes to cinematic representations of it.
Details that will sail by anyone uninterested, uninformed about or un-obsessed by the punchy, kicky, grappl-y world tend to wind me up horribly.
That said, with a few glaring exceptions, there’s a lot for MMA fans to enjoy about Warrior. If, however, your love of fighting is the only reason you’re watching the film then you’re missing out because what Gavin O’Connor has crafted is a thing of high quality. It is an intense and fascinating family drama with some powerful performances from its three main leads.
Imagine Rocky if Sly had a brother (no, not you Frank) he hated who was equally tough and deserving of the audiences admiration, love and sympathy.
Would you pick sides? Who would you choose?
Joel Edgerton and Tom Hardy star as Brendan and Tommy Conlon, two brothers on opposite sides of a family split. Tommy, a star athlete, left with his mother while Brendan, the older of the two, stayed behind with abusive, alcoholic father, Paddy (Nick Nolte).
While the years have given Brendan a wife, daughters and a career as a physics teacher, Tommy, a former marine, is a sullen, shattered man – more a creature of rage and bitterness than anything else.
Both brothers – Brendan a former pro fighter and Tommy a natural-born wrecking machine – are drawn to train for a two-night MMA tournament with a $5m prize. Tommy returns to his father for training, seemingly looking for an outlet for his barely controlled rage. Brendan needs to win because  the expense of his daughter’s heart transplant is choking the life out of the family finances.
So a good old-fashioned family feud involving expert fighters set on the backdrop of MMA. Let’s get it on!
The predictability of Warrior’s story is, strangely, one of its most appealing traits. One imagines though that this is only true because the central performances are all so gripping.
While the fighting scenes are some of the better representations of MMA committed to celluloid so far, their visceral impact pale in comparison to the two brothers spitting venom at each other on a beach or Nolte screaming tearfully as he listens to Moby Dick.
Make no mistake, this is not a sports movie with some flashy acting, Warrior is a portrait of a shattered family painted on a canvass of the world’s toughest, most compelling combat sport.
The Killer Elite isn’t anywhere as stupid as it sounds. In fact the story’s quite clever. Unfortunately like your beloved scientist uncle, it’s clever but very, very scattered. (also it smells of peppermint and Woodbines, but that’s another matter).
Based on a true story – in the same way, one suspects,  that Transformers is based on a true story – it draws its inspiration from the book The Feather Men by Sir Ranulph Fiennes which claims to reveal a plot by a Sheikh Amr, a deposed king of a small region of Oman, to kill the SAS operatives responsible for his sons’ deaths during military action in the country in the ’60s and ’70s.
The Feather Men are a secret society of old, ex-SAS who use their influence to watch over former servicemen who committed secret and sinister acts for Queen and Country and they exercise their physical powers through the Clive Owen’s super trooper, Spike.
Of course, the heroes here aren’t the old men or their well-trained hound, rather the plot focuses on Jason Statham’s Danny, a retired mercenary blackmailed back into action by the Sheikh to kill the aforementioned soldiers. And the leverage? His old partner, mentor and best mate, Hunter, as played by the one and only Robert De Niro.
Rather than being an afternoon tea drinking version of The Expendables, Killer Elite is an intense and sometimes riveting action drama. Unfortunately it gets let down by a messy and confusing story and a script that needed more than just a cursory spit and polish.
Despite this, Statham proves that he is more than just a competent athlete with delusions of acting. He’s never likely to bother the Oscar committee but he gives Danny far more depth than you’d expect from a bog-standard action flick. De Niro, meanwhile, continues his bewildering spiral into work that would have been considered far below him 20 years ago. He’s not bad by any means, but really? This is the guy who was in Taxi Driver, The Godfather 2 and Heat?

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