New Karate Kid in Town Learns to “Never Back Down”
Never Back Down
Film Review by Kam Williams
After her husband dies in a car accident while
driving under the influence, Margot Tyler (Leslie Hope) decides to relocate from
Iowa to Orlando,
Florida for a fresh start with
her two teenage sons. Plus, there’s the added incentive of enrolling her
younger one, Charlie (Wyatt Smith), in a tennis camp catering to promising
prodigies.
Unfortunately,
the grieving widow failed to factor in the toll the move might take on her elder
boy, Jake (Sean Faris), a sensitive soul who has been beset by unaddressed
anger management issues ever since the tragedy. Jake is easily upset about the
subject because he was sitting in the passenger seat that fateful night. So,
he’s hard on himself, always agonizing over why he hadn’t intervened.
Consequently, all it takes is for some mean kid to say, “You’re dead dad was a
drunk,” for him to fly into a rage the same way the Three Stooges were
triggered by the words “Niagara Falls” in their classic comedy skit.
You would
expect, then, that with a change of scenery he’d be able to leave all the teasing
and his painful memories behind. However, in this age of the internet, a
person’s past is just a Google search away. So, it isn’t long before Jake’s
story reaches the ears of Ryan McCarthy (Cam Gigandet), the ringleader of a sadistic gang of ne’er-do-wells at
his new school who like to fight for
fighting’s sake.
Next, Ryan’s
girlfriend, Baja (Amber Heard), feigns a romantic interest in Jake, seductively
inviting him to a party, never letting on that he’s coming over just to take a
bloody beat down. Soon after he arrives, Ryan callously plays the “Your dead dad was a drunk” card, and Jake predictably pops his cork, unaware that his opponent
has a black belt in brawling.
A rescue
squad arrives in the person of 98-pound weakling Max Cooperman (Evan Peters).
He who peels Jake off the floor and directs him to the Combat Club, a mixed martial
arts dojo run out of a rundown warehouse by Jean Roqua (Djimon Hounsou), a spiritually-oriented
sensei from Senegal. Like a latter-day Mr. Miyagi allows the lad to enroll with
the understanding, “No fighting outside of the gym, no matter what” because
“people who come here for the wrong reasons never last.”
What disciplinarian Mr. Roqua doesn’t
know is that Jake’s ulterior motive is to even the score with Ryan in an upcoming
streetfighting tournament. He simultaneously plans to steal the heart of Baja
who suddenly has second thoughts about allowing herself to be manipulated by her
bully of a boyfriend.
While Never Back Down offers few surprises, at
least plot-wise, for anyone already familiar with The Karate Kid (austere
training regimen), Fight Club (wanton nihilism), Kung Fu (“Grasshopper”), Rocky
(drinking raw eggs) and the rest of the mano-a-mano genre, it does add several
21st Century elements to the mix (like the use of YouTube) which serve
to make the familiar formula feel refreshed.
The film is
grounded by another powerful performance by two-time Oscar-nominee Djimon
Hounsou (In America and Blood Diamond) who again manages to elevate what might
have otherwise merely been a mediocre movie by imbuing his every scene with that
trademark gravitas. And the rest of the cast members are talented, too, though
they tend to be at their best during the highly-stylized, state-of-the-art
fight sequences.
The
Karate Kid joins the Fight Club and kicks butt!
Excellent (3.5 stars) Rated PG-13 for mature themes, intense violence, profanity, teen
partying and premarital sexuality.
Running time: 112 minutes
Studio: Summit
Entertainment
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http://imdb.com/title/tt1023111/mediaindex