Considering I would rank it somewhere between watching shirtless rednecks drive homemade vehicles up steep hills, and betting on underground cockfights in dirty Mexican warehouses, I don't hold the practice of mixing martial arts (better known as "em-em-ayye," to the hyper-beefcake correctionists clad in TapOut-branded tees) in very high regard. A truly graceless sport for the graceless, if there ever were one. So you can imagine how infrequently do I ever find myself hankering to put on a TV dinner and watch two neckless and obscenely muscular neanderthals wearing only booty shorts punch, kick, elbow, and grope each other until one is either knocked completely unconscious, or relents on account of having been strangled in the nethers until his steroid-ravaged testicles became lodged in his own windpipe. Regardless of what disciplines are being haphazardly mixed, it's about as martially artistic as "the whirling about of a medicine ball by the handle through a pyramid of frozen turkeys,* but that's hardly the point.
* on a side note, I'd be pleased as piss if there were black belts to be obtained through this
Hyperbole be damned, if you have time and/or patience for but one movie this year, your priorities would not be so grossly misaligned if you opted for that one movie to be Warrior. Yes, that's Nick Nolte, no the ending isn't predictable, and yes, The National makes an emotionally punctuated appearance on the soundtrack. Fair warning; while this film hardly legitimizes the salami-pounding circus that is MMA, through an excellent cast and some extremely capable screenwriting, it still somehow manages to find itself in a league on par with even The Fighter, which was nearly as superb as that one time Rocky flew to Russia to punch a blonde robot in the face a few hundred times and end the cold war.
Rocky IV was it?
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