Warrior: Punch here is emotional


Starring: Nick Nolte, Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton
At: PVR & others
Rated: 6.5/10
You like a brawny brew? Muscled men punching the blood out of their opponents for no apparent reason? Ring maniacs, training for annihilation to a cheering jam-packed crowd? Those Rocky Belboa type of aspirants in it not so much for pride as for money?
Warriors is a strange mix of all this something more, and it’s that something more that scores the brawny as well as the brownie points for it. And that something is the interweaving of a whole lot of emotions around an estranged family of a father — drunk wife beater boxing legend and his two sons, one a family man and the other a secluded shadowy character — all alluring, frustrated, helpless and yet laudable characters in their separate domains. All losers too, in a way. But, all winners in the end.
The little bit of a hitch with Warriors is that it takes time to build up the poignancies of a family which has seen a mother dying in anonymity, brothers getting estranged and a father deserting all of them amid violence of the untold kind. But now mother is dead and the younger brother has returned — to a father whom he uses as his emotional punching bag as much as his trainer for the $5 million big fight of “free martial art boxing” if you can fathom what that can be.
In Warriors it is a kind of a super bowl event on the Atlanta beach with WWF connotations. But the entry in the ring comes with a surprising whiff of emotions — brother fights brother even though brother loves brother type of emotions.
And that’s the USP of this one — it makes you cry out not in pain as much as in lament of a familial homecoming.
Source: Sunday Pioneer, 18, September, 2011

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