Unrivaled (2010)

Unrivaled (2010)

 

Starring: Hector Echavarria, Steven Yaffee, Nicholas Campbell, Jordan Madley, Ashleigh Hubbard, Al Sapienza, Keith Jardine, Rashad Evans, Ryan Robbins, Nathan Marquardt, Desmond Campbell, Tig Fong
Director: Warren P. Sonoda
Action Director: Hector Echavarria

A year or so ago, my book was cited in an article at the South China Morning Post. The author referred to me as “martial arts expert Blake Matthews,” which is a bit of a stretch. However, that was enough to get me away from writing a book about Japanese giant monster movies that nobody would read and have me focusing on the niche of martial arts cinema. Not that I would ever become good enough to be an expert, but I could at least try.

In order to be an expert, I guess I should be willing to dig around the corners that I never did as a teenager when I was renting A Better Tomorrow or Hard Boiled for the fifth time. Man, to imagine how many films I would have on my “Watched” list had I not found The Undaunted Wudang interesting enough for a third rental. Well, that was back in the late 90s. Now we’re in 2022, and up until this evening, I had never seen a Hector Echavarria movie. While Maximum Risk was sort of the first mainstream movie to really try to bring ground fighting into the usual martial arts hokum, I think it was Echavarria who really tried to build a film career and business model off of the growing popularity of MMA and UFC.

According to his Wikipedia article—which I assume was written by him or someone from his native Argentina, considering all the grammar errors in the text—Echavarria was born in Argentina who started learning taiqi quan as a way of treating his asthma. By the time he reached his teenage years, he had already mastered the art, plus judo and jiu-jitsu. So, he added tae kwon do and karate to his résumé as well. He had a successful professional fighting career, accumulating 11 world titles in kickboxing. Concurrently with his fighting career, he also started acting in his native Argentina, headlining in a highly-successful film Los Extermineitors and its sequel.

In 2001, Echavarria started his American career alongside Michel “Tong Po” Qissi and his brother, Yousef, in Extreme Force. Although the film has a low rating at the IMDB (3.8/10), the reviews concede that Echavarria is indeed a skilled martial artist. After a couple of other movies, including a small role in the Jet Li flick Cradle 2 the Grave, Echavarria was ready for the spotlight with Confessions of a Pit Fighter. He quickly became notorious for low-budget MMA films that bordered on softcore pornography. Tonight’s film, Unrivaled, follows that trend.

We open with our hero, Ringo Duran (Echavarria), getting ready for a small-time MMA bout. His opponent, Luca “The Brute” Popoff (“Strikeforce” welterweight champion Nathan Marquardt), is a dirty cheat and beats him into submission with a makeshift brass knuckles that the ref is too stupid notice. A humiliated Duran leaves the match and heads to the strip club where he works as a barista. There, we learn a few things: 1) Duran sort of has a crush on his co-worker, Kara (Shark City’s Jordan Madley); 2) Duran has a $20,000 debt with a loan shark named Sergio Ponzo (prolific character actor Al Sapienza); and 3) Echavarria and director Warren P. Sonoda love the female body. While strip club scenes often provide the movie with background breasts with the occasional close-up for red-blooded males, this movie practically shows entire routines.

Ponzo gives Duran a month to pay off his debt, which considering his losing fight record and strip club barista salary, is a hard order. Adding insult to injury is arrival of a jerk-off bruiser named Alonso Scott (Keith Jardine, who had a role in Logan) at the gym Duran trains at. Scott is an arrogant a**hole who belittles Duran every chance he gets. Must be hard to know that you’re about to die a “never-was.”

Things change when MMA champion Apollo Creed Christopher “The Pressure” Holland (The Ultimate Fighter heavyweight winner Rashad Evans) decides to hold a special amateur tournament with the promise of the winner going pro…against Chris himself. Unbeknownst to Ringo, his groupie and training partner Link (Steven Yaffee) has signed him up for the tournament. Although Chris Holland is against the idea of a never-was like Ringo participating, his company’s CEO likes the underdog angle (shades of Rocky) and brings him in. Now Ringo has a shot at the big money, not to mention the opportunity to give his career a modicum of dignity. But this particular road to success will have more than its fair share of bumps.

To use a Stallone analogy, Unrivaled is two parts Rocky and one part The Party at Kitty and Stud’s. Seriously, I haven’t seen this much female flesh in a martial arts film since Lethal Panther, but it comes close to matching Challenge of the Tiger in terms of quantity. The thing is that you have a decent little underdog sports movie in here, but the first act is so distracted with the boobs and pubic hairs of the strip club’s employees that it cheapens the movie’s attempt at real drama later. And I was honestly feeling for Ringo’s plight at the end, so there is a good movie hiding behind bare buns and breasts. I’m sure that Hector Echavarria had progressed enough as an actor by this point—he’s no Tom Hardy in Warrior, but he suffices for a DTV effort—that he could have sold this film on the drama and his own martial prowess. He didn’t need the filler that would please drunken frat boy UFC fans.

The action, choreographed by Hector Echavarria himself (and with the other professional fighters in the cast serving as “Fight Consultants”), is disappointing. Let’s put it this way: the camera lingers on the strippers’ nipples longer than it does the combatants. The editing is hyperactive, with an average one punch per cut. That gets annoying very quickly. The characters take more face punches than your average real-life MMA fighter could take, but as this is a film, I’ll cut it slack there. But since we’re applying movie logic here, I would have hoped that there’d be more flashy kicks to break up the monotonous Mississippi haymaker punches that compose the bulk of the fights.

As a fan of tournament fights, I was disappointed that Alonso Scott’s first fight in the tournament wasn’t given the onscreen treatment. I mean, this is a 4-fight tournament: Semi-finals, Finals, and then a final fight with Holland. In a 108-minute movie, you can easily squeeze in what the characters describe as an 11-second fight into the running time. Instead, we see two seconds of the fight on a TV screen and that’s it. Bad action direction here, folks.

The other problem with the fights is a story point, but it is an issue for me. The whole gambling debt subplot bleeds into the main story when Sergio the loan shark decides to get in on the racket. What it means is that one combatant is paid to take the fall during the tournament. So, the one fight that arguably had the most emotional resonance to it is largely a one-sided affair because of this specific subplot. It makes sense from a storytelling POV, but as a fight junkie, I can’t help but feel gypped.

I’m really not going run out and comb all the failing video stores (or the Brazilian equivalent to Ebay) to look for DVDs of Echavarria’s other films. If I want MMA in my movies, I’ll content myself to Donnie Yen’s contributions. This one had promise, but was spoiled by the unnecessary amount of T&A. His films before this look like they don’t even have that initial promise…