Warrior

Movie: Warrior

Genre: action-drama

Synopsis: Brendan Conlon (Joel Edgerton) and Tommy Conlon (Tom Hardy) are brothers.  Growing up, Tommy was a champion wrestler of amazing talent.  When their abusive, alcoholic father, Paddy (Nick Nolte), became too much to bear, Tom and his mother fled.  Brendan opted to stay behind.  Flash forward to the present.  Brendan is a high school physic teacher, married (to Jennifer Morrison) with children and is estranged from his father.  He is also about to lose his house to the bank.  Tommy has returned home for the first time since he left – while he was gone, he had no contact with his brother or his father.  Although he still despises his father, Tommy asks him to help him train for an upcoming Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) world championship.  Paddy has been sober for 1000 days and agrees to train Tommy, in hopes of building a relationship.  Brendan also enters the same MMA tournament – in hopes of winning the $5 million prize so he can save his house from foreclosure.

My two cents: A really enjoyable movie.  While there are a lot of fight sequences that are well done and fun to watch, the movie is just as much about a father trying to redeem himself with his sons and build a relationship with them – and the sons trying to bring themselves to forgive their father and each other and put the past behind them.  Nick Nolte was great to watch.  I first saw him as a boxer in “Rich Man Poor Man” in the 1976.  It was interesting to watch him play a tired old man trying to coach his middle-aged son as a fighter. I also liked seeing Jennifer Morrison (Brendan’s wife) – I have not seen much of her since she left “House”.

Bottom line: most definitely worth seeing.

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