Never Back Down (2008)

Never Back Down (2008)

Starring:  Sean Farris, Djimon Hounsou, Amber Heard, Cam Gigandet, Evan Peters
Director:  Jeff Wadlow
Action Directors: 87 Eleven Stunt Team

 

I should like MMA (mixed martial arts – fighting styles that mix elements of jiu-jitsu, muay thai, and Lord knows what else) more than I actually do. After all, I myself wrestled for a year in high school and thus have a basic knowledge of how ground fighting works. Heck, it was because of wrestling that I was able to win the respect of Jason Hamilton, a smart-aleck football player that attended church with me. He always enjoyed making fun of me for no reason whatsoever, so when I was able to wrestle and pin him on two occasions, despite his being taller and stronger than me, it was proof that I wasn’t quite the weakling I came across as.

With this in mind, you’d think that a sport that involves jiu-jitsu and thus a lot of ground-based fighting, holds, etc. would be an instant sell to me. But it isn’t. Oh, don’t get me wrong: I loved Donnie Yen’s use of MMA in films like Flash Point and SPL (and some of the other films he choreographed). But then, Hong Kong action directors have a talent for making almost any style look great on screen. That’s just how they are.

There have been a number of recent films featuring MMA, including the softcore porn brawlers with Hector Echavarria, Fighting, and most films featuring Donnie Yen made after 2005. There’s a cable channel called SPACE here in Brazil which is constantly showing Ultimate Fighting-esque programs, the type that you originally had to pay otherwise good money for on Pay-Per-View back in the States during the 1990s.

The truth of the matter is: I don’t care a whole lot about MMA, at least on film. As effective as it may be in a real fight, it ends up being limited by its very own realism. Realistic fighting is severely hindered in cinematic representation by the fact that it’s uninteresting, often sloppily executed, and simply not fun to look at (unless the person who’s taking the beating is someone you really don’t care for—but that has nothing to do with the aesthetic value of the fight itself). Now if you add American choreographers, photographers, and editors to the mix, who have proven themselves time and time again to be some of the most incompetent boobs around in action cinema, then you have a recipe for “boring fight scene.”

Nonetheless, whenever a martial arts movie comes on television, especially one that I’m hesitant to fork over otherwise useful money to rent, I make an effort to sit down and watch it. That is how I came to watch Never Back Down, which is something of a remake of The Karate Kid, but with MMA and well-endowed 25-year-old high girls running around in bikinis and occasionally kissing each other.

The movie begins with Jake (Sean Farris, The King of Fighters) playing football somewhere in Iowa. He’s apparently a good player, but also a loose cannon. The latter trait comes into play when a player from the opposing team insults his dead father, causing him to start a brawl on the field and subsequently get expelled. This, combined with Jake’s brother being some sort of promising tennis prodigy, causes his mother to move them to Orlando, where they can put their past behind them and Jake’s brother can supposedly get a head start in his tennis playing.

Jake enters the local high school and soon makes friends with a hot blonde girl whose name I don’t remember and honestly don’t care enough about to look up on the Wikipedia (Amber Heard, The Ward and Drive Angry). While wandering around the campus on his first day, he comes across random pit fight between some dork, Max (Evan Peters, Kick-Ass) and another fellow. This apparently is a school with no hall monitors, security, or anything like that. We’ll see as the synopsis progresses that most of this film is set in some alternate universe, quite alien to the Earth I live on. At my high school, you could never get away a fight behind bleachers, much less a small-scale underground pit fight. In any case, Max is getting the beat down and Jake tries to break it up, only to find out that it’s an “organized” fight, complete with betting and what have you. Max becomes Jake’s first real friend and urges him to get involved with MMA, but Jake refuses as he’s trying to be a good boy for once.

Of course, if he stuck to his original principles, we wouldn’t have much of a movie. So, enter: Ryan (Cam Gigandet, Priest and Twilight), a rich kid/brawler/emotionally-abused child/son of a famous fighter/whatever who has seen the YouTube footage of Jake fighting on the football field and wants an opportunity to take him on personally. The aforementioned blonde gets Jake to go to a party, which is filled with lesbians in hot tubs and more illegal brawls. On Counter-Earth, women find illegal brawling incredibly attractive and you’re apparently judged by the student body by how well you can handle yourself in a fight. It’s there that Ryan challenges Jake to a fight. Jake turns down the challenge, even when Ryan passionately kisses the blonde girl in front of him. Ryan then goes for the nuclear option: make fun of Jake’s dad. And it’s on. Well, not really. Jake may have been violent, but he’s not a trained MMA bad-to-the-bone high-schooler-with-nothing-better-to-do like Ryan is, and subsequently is severely beaten.

The next day, while Jake is recovering from his thrashing, Max shows up and convinces him to start training under his master, a Brazilian MMA expert named Jean Rocqua (Djimon Hounsou, The Blood Diamond and Gladiator). Let me stop here for a moment and complain about the name. Jean is obviously a French name; the Portuguese equivalent would be “João.” I’m not sure what “Rocqua” translates into, but it looks a lot like “Rocha.” While I have known a couple of people here in Brazil named “Jean,” why couldn’t they give him a more Brazilian-sounding name if his character is from Brazil? It’s enough that the Brazilian guy is played not someone who’s not Brazilian (albeit a good actor).

Okay, pointless ramble of mine finished.

Because we need some sort of contrivance for this movie to go forward, Mr. Rocqua sees some sort of potential in Jake upon their first meeting and arranges for him to have special, personalized training. So we get some scenes of Jake doing some exercises interspersed with random scenes of Jake’s mother doing things around the house or arguing with Jake because he’s training. Let me state here that the movie paints his mother as being too argumentative and critical of her son to make a later scene where she meets his coach and they both agree that Jake is a good kid have any real resonance.

We also get to see the blonde girl do stuff in the movie, too. Since her inviting Jake to the party was essentially what got him into this whole mess, he’s not all that happy with her at the moment. She tries to apologize to him several times, but it never seems to work. Finally, Jake himself apologizes to her for not accepting her apologies, and no sooner does he do that than is he kissing her. I think the scene is pretty silly, but then I remember that a similar situation showed up in a fan fiction story I once wrote, so maybe I should just shut up.

So Jake eventually gets himself kicked out of Jean’s gym after he beats up a bunch of would-be carjackers (because all self-respecting martial arts school owners would teach a self-defense system to their pupils and pointedly not want them to defend themselves with it) and the video hits YouTube and makes him “famous” at school again. He takes an interest in participating in the Beatdown, a large-scale illegal tournament that Ryan is sure to participate in. Now let’s consider the last two sentences: practically every fight in this movie is filmed and shows up at YouTube  at one point or another and there’s a illegal fighting tournament that is held at—get this—a large, popular club. I don’t know where the police in Orlando are, but I’m pretty sure that if a no-holds barred tournament was being held at a large dance club, attended by people who regularly record and post videos of fighting on YouTube, the police or FBI would keep regular tabs on these people to be able to bust such things.

In any case, Jake gets kicked out of the gym for breaking Jean’s number one rule: No Fighting.

Long story short: Jake goes back into training and decides not to participate in the Beatdown. Ryan decides he doesn’t like this and has Max beaten up. Once again, where are the police? Jake decides that he has to *yawn* stop running and fight one more time so that he doesn’t have to *yawn* fight anymore.

Writing an in-depth analysis of this movie is a daunting task. Truth to be told, I’m really not up to it. This movie should’ve garnered a Brief Skirmish review, but I felt that I needed more Hollywood films with long write-ups. So I was stupid and wrote about this one. Rating the film wasn’t hard, but after writing the synopsis, any extra paragraphs detailing and expounding on the film’s flaws would be rather redundant. That really just leaves us with the action, which is pretty solid by American movie standards. As usual, we could do without the stylized editing, close-ups, and quick cuts. The training scenes were entertaining enough for me to liken them to the good old days of old school kung fu movies with their extensive, creative training sequences. The fights themselves are a mix of boxing-like hand techniques, ground fighting, and the occasional aerial kick to make things “look cool.” It’s generally satisfying, although as I’ve already stated, Donnie Yen makes it look a lot better on screen without all the unnecessary camera tricks. After the movie, I commented to my wife that Hong Kong action looks a lot better on film and is more graceful than what I had just watched—another reminder of why I so seldom venture away from Chinese cinema.