(andPOP) - I'm not an especially patient person, and it occurs to me the movies might be partly responsible for this. How can we accept that good things come to those who wait when we're consistently bombarded with happy relationships between couples who have just met, or history-making accomplishments that require no more than three hours of the protagonist's involvement? How can we accept that it takes years to learn a musical instrument, when we've seen character after character master it in minutes, or martial arts, when according to the movies all it requires is a training sequence and a montage?
I'm not trying to insult filmgoers (including myself), but I suspect there are more viewers out there who identify with Homer Simpson's immortal words than we'd like to admit: "If something's hard to do, then it's not worth doing. You just stick that guitar in the closet next to your short wave radio, your karate outfit, and your unicycle and we'll go inside and watch TV."
So it is with Never Back Down, another film that takes something difficult (in this case, mixed martial arts) and makes it look easy, wrapping it inside another Rocky/Karate Kid-like underdog's tale.
No, I'm not going to continue moaning about cliches. Accusing a movie like Never Back Down of being cliched is like accusing a dog of barking when it first meets you - it might turn out to be lovable or annoying, but criticizing its instinct means you probably shouldn't be acknowledging it in the first place. What matters in a movie like this is, are the fight sequences exciting? Is the hero someone you care about? Is the villain someone you want to see taken down?
Under the first criteria, at least, the movie fails: our hero, Jake Tyler (Sean Faris), is a pacifist who doesn't want to fight (though he's provoked easily when someone mentions his dead father); the villain, Ryan McCarthy (Cam Gigandet) has no reason to hate him; and the villain (and later our hero)'s girlfriend (Amber Heard) ropes Jake into his first fight against Ryan for no apparent reason. Jake's sidekick, Max Cooperman (Evan Peters), seems like the kind of guy who's intelligent enough to realize he shouldn't get into a car with Ryan, but then 30 minutes before the movie ends he does.
What bugs me the most about Never Back Down is that Jake starts off knowing the correct lesson: He's angry, but would rather walk away from a fight than start one. Later he begins attacking people without provocation (the film actually glorifies one act of warrantless violence, when Jake attacks a trio of drivers and grievously injures one by slamming them into a sideview mirror - the results are posted on YouTube and his classmates applaud him for it), before learning to back off again. The movie argues (correctly, I think) that sometimes you can't walk away from a fight, but at the end of the film the only thing that's really changed is Jake has become much better at beating up people who make fun of him.
As for the action scenes, by Hollywood standards they're entertaining enough. I don't expect readers to be familiar with Donnie Yen's recent Hong Kong fare, such as SPL or Flashpoint, but unlike those movies the fight sequences are not as gripping as what you'll see during any given UFC match. While the final battle is somewhat rousing and the screenplay has one or two (literally) glimmers of intelligence, overall Never Back Down doesn't work well enough for me to recommend it.
