by rick grant rickgrant01@comcast.net
C+ Rated PG-13 106 min
If you are a teenage boy with excess testosterone coursing through your bloodstream, then this “fight club” scenario will provide the adrenaline your adolescent psyche requires. Naturally, these young men want to bash each other’s faces in over the slightest infraction or jealously. Never Back Down focuses on Jake Tyler (Sean Faris), a star athlete from his Iowa hometown, who moves to Orlando with his mom and younger brother – a tennis prodigy. But now he has to face a new school and try to get along. Jake’s fight on the football field went viral on the Internet and his reputation preceded him.
Before long, Jake is invited to join the underground fight club, dominated by the school bully, Ryan McCarthy (Cam Gigandet). The competition is based on Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) rules and the fights are officiated. Ryan is a trained MMA fighter and defeats all of the school wannabes who go up against him. Jake is essentially an unskilled brawler. When Ryan goads Jake into fighting him, Ryan easily beats and humiliates him.
Ryan gets perverse delight in beating the crap out of his challengers. Jake’s tag-along friend, Max Cooperman (Evan Peters), advises Jake to go to a special school to train as an MMA fighter. The school is run by Jean Roqua (Djimon Hounsou), a champion MMA fighter who forbids his trainees from engaging in underground fight clubs.
Of course, the script builds up the rivalry between Jake and Ryan with Ryan’s girlfriend, Baja Miller (Amber Heard), caught in the middle. Ryan knows that Jake likes Baja and the feeling is mutual, so he uses this to bully Jake. The tension escalates between Jake and Ryan and savvy viewers know where this is going – the big smack down.
Meanwhile, Jake joins Roqua’s gym to train. He quickly learns that Roqua is a taskmaster who demands extreme training to toughen Jake’s body. Jake is running on rage, which overloads his system with adrenaline and consequently leads to sloppy execution. Roqua teaches him to channel his anger into his training and use his mind to defeat his opponents. But Jake can only think of the day when he can put Ryan in his place.
Directed by Jeff Wadlow and written by Chris Hauty, the script follows a formulaic path appealing to teenage boys who like MMA fighting. Wadlow did take the time to develop the characters before staging the fight scenes, which built to a crescendo of martial arts action. Mixed Martial Arts involves various disciplines including boxing, karate and judo. It requires a high level of training and toughness to take the kicks and punches.
Baja’s waffling between Jake and Ryan is exacerbating the animosity between them. At home, Jake’s Mom is upset with him over his past brawling and other typical teenage problems. To further intensify Jake’s motivation, Hauty’s script uses a device set in the past to explain Jake’s depression. His father was killed in a car accident and Jake was in the car. He feels immense guilt for surviving after letting his dad drive drunk. In this case, Jake’s guilt has turned to anger manifested in Ryan’s sneering persona. Jake is determined to wipe that sneer off Ryan’s face.
As the momentum builds to the predictable grand finale–the beatdown fight between Jake and Ryan, Baja falls for Jake and realizes that Ryan is a jerk. This attempts to tie in the romantic angle that will appeal to the girls who are dragged to the movie by their boyfriends, who just want to see the fight scenes.
Whether you are a teenage boy, or just an adolescent at heart, this film capitalizes on the MMA trend with a “high school confidential” story mixed into the screaming angst, which is channeled through furious fists and feet.
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