I re-watched Warrior this weekend with my son and it is the most adrenaline-pumping, satisfying movie about brotherhood, fatherhood, fighting, family, forgiveness, honor, work and a dozen other manly things that are too long to list here.
If you’ve seen it, you know.
I first caught Warrior in the theater back when it came out in 2011. I wasn’t a dad yet. I was in my early thirties. And I remembered loving it and thinking of it as an excellent MMA version of ‘Rocky I’, but with brothers.
Gritty training scenes.
Great fight scenes.
Kick ass finale.
Warrior has everything you’d want in a great drama, but most importantly it has two clearly-defined main characters who are after the same exact prize (the $5 million Sparta Tournament winnings) but go about it entirely different ways.
Tommy Conlon, played by Tom Hardy, is an ex-Marine, ex-elite high school wrestler who earned his way into the Sparta tournament by viciously beating the crap out of a highly-ranked MMA fighter, Pete “Mad Dog” Grimes, during a sparring session in his hometown gym. One of the spectators in the gym posted the video online, it went viral, and the media took care of the rest.
His older brother, Brendan Conlon, is an ex-UFC fighter, now-suspended high school physics teacher, who is about to lose his house because he spent all his money on his daughter’s heart surgery. He’s been fighting at strip clubs and bars to make ends meet (he got suspended from teaching because of the fighting) and when his trainer’s top prospect for the tournament gets hurt, Brendan pleads with him to let him enter.
This is the part that missed me a bit while watching it before kids. I got it. But I didn’t get it. I know you know what I mean.
Now? As a dad? These scenes with Brendan and his family and the pressure he’s under… The looks on his face. The care. The worry. You feel them in your soul.
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Once the stakes are established, the estranged Conlon Brothers both show up at the tourney in Atlantic City having not seen each other for 15 years.
Why?
Their dad, played by Nick Nolte in an Academy Award-nominated performance, is an alcoholic and used to beat on the kids and his wife so badly that the younger Conlon brother, Tommy, fled with his mom when he was only thirteen.
Brendan stayed because of his girlfriend (who he is currently married to), but the two brothers hadn’t spoken since.
Also, they both hate their dad for how he treated them.
Suffice to say, the dad-Brendan-Tommy relationship triangle is a blend of anger, resentment, fury, confusion, longing and abandonment with a dash of remorse. Decades of family bullshit embodied in two brothers who both believe they did the right thing.
As the tournament begins, Tommy is fueled by an otherworldly rage that manifests itself like a volcanic inferno. As his fights begin, his veins are popping, his ridiculous traps are flared like cables holding up a bridge and his eyes are dead black like a great white shark’s. In short order, he beats the shit out of three dudes who are all used to beating the shit out of other dudes.
Brendan is driven by one thing: a desire to save his house for his wife and two daughters. He was a .500 fighter when he was in the UFC but now he’s north of 30. He’s got smarts and skills, but it’s clear he’s not a superior athlete and he’s the lowest ranked of the 16 guys in the tournament. He’s the longest shot there is.
Brendan isn’t there to prove he’s the toughest guy on the planet. He’s not there because of ego or fame. He’s there because he has to be. He’s there because if he doesn’t win, he’s out of a job and his family is out of a home.
He’s not fighting with hate.
He’s fighting with heart.
Unlike Tommy’s fights, Brendan’s match-ups are all excruciating battles where he gets his ass handed to him for much of the fight and takes beatings that the announcers and fans aren’t sure he can come back from.
But he’ll never tap out. He’ll never give up. Because he can’t.
Each of his fights goes a slightly different way, but in the end, his heart and his courage allow him to snatch victory from the jaws of a severe concussion and a long hospital stay.
Of course, the film’s final scene is a showdown between the brothers and as happens in all of Brendan’s fights, Tommy mauls him and brutalizes him for the first few rounds. Brendan has no answer for his brother’s physical onslaught.
At certain moments, the fight looks like a mini-Hulk throwing around a corpse.
It’s bad.
I won’t ruin the ending for you, but the final fifteen minutes are an intense whirlwind of hooks, jabs, heel kicks, submissions, sweat and raw emotion.
It’s a brilliant movie.
These brothers have missed out on half their lives together because of bullshit that started when they were thirteen. They were kids. And it took them nearly killing each other in front of millions of people as grown men to work through it.
They had to fight their way to each other’s forgiveness, literally.
Maybe that’s a metaphor for all of us to think about when it comes to shit we’re holding onto from years ago. Hopefully you won’t have to suffer a debilitating and excruciating arm bar to put it all in your past and move forward.
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Jon Finkel
Editor-in-Chief, Midlife Male
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