Packin’ A Punch
Never Back Down, while reminding me of one of my favorite older films, looked just too much like a teen movie when I saw the trailer. The photogenic cast, the luxurious locales; it just seemed like Fight Club meets The Fast And the Furious, with a nod to The Karate Kid, all packaged up for teenagers, right down to the PG-13 rating. Turns out, for the most part, I was right, but Never Back Down has more substance than I was expecting. The story is eerily similar to The Karate Kid in many ways. For example, at the outset of the movie, Jake Tyler, played by Sean Faris of primarily TV show fame, his younger brother, and mother are moving away from the small town to the fast paced city of Orlando, Florida (you might recall that the opening scene of Karate Kid is he and his mother moving). A tremendous amount of tension keeps this family in a constant state of stress, with the biggest contributor being the death of the father. Jake’s father was drunk, but he wanted to drive, and Jake let him – resulting in an accident that left his father dead, but Jake alive. Jake struggles with the thought that his younger brother and his mother blame the death on him, but he bottles up these emotions and they result in anger, and lots of fights at school.
One such fight, during the opening scene, is at a high school football game. When Jake gets pushed the wrong way and someone on the opposing team calls out his father’s death, Jake goes ballistic and fights the other player, a spectacle that gets filmed and put up on YouTube. When he arrives for school in Orlando, he’s fairly popular, quick, because of this fight video. Meanwhile, Cam Gigandet plays the rich, arrogant and also troubled young man named Ryan who is a ‘champion’ MMA fighter in Orlando, having won the secretive Beatdown title two times. Jake is lured to a party at Ryan’s mansion by Baja, Ryan’s current girlfriend, played by Amber Heard. Once there, Jake is suddenly challenged to a fight, gets beat, and resolves to get revenge.
Enter 365 Combat, an MMA training gym run by Jean Roqua, played by Djimon Hounsou. Djimon takes Jake under his wing over the course of several months in a relationship that isn’t always smooth and trains him into a skilled MMA fighter. I liked the Roqua character a lot; Roqua’s views on when, how, and why to fight, and knowing above all when not to are agreeable and I’m glad that’s how his character was scripted. Of course, had his character been the same as Ryan’s, who was all about arrogance and fighting in front of as many people as he could, but then it wouldn’t have really made a very interesting film.
Ultimately on the eve of the Beatdown tournament, Jake decides he’s going to take a rain check as he’s happy with his new girlfriend and is finally find some peace in his life. When one of his buddies gets beat up by Ryan, he decides it’s time to ‘end this’ with Ryan and he enters into the Beatdown tournament. You can probably guess the ending from here, if not, just check out the ending of The Karate Kid and you’ll be all set. Honestly, the similarities between the two films are unmistakable, as Never Back Down does reuse a lot of the ideas of The Karate Kid (who, as far as I know, might have reused them from another film or book before it). That said though, it’s just as true that originality is not one of the requirements for a great, or even good film. In sum, I thought Never Back Down did a nice job of modernizing one of the fine stories of the 80s.
On Blu-ray
Never Back Down on Blu-ray is great. Being a new film, I wasn’t too surprised when the visual and audio quality was amongst some of the best I’ve seen and heard to date. The video looks excellent, in part due to the many colorful, sunny outdoor scenes and the colorful clothing that the main actors wear. I saw maybe a brief scene or two where there things looked a bit blocky, but these scenes were very brief. Otherwise, the film looked superb.
It’s not too common that you get a Blu-ray release with some really interesting extra features. Never Back Down on Blu-ray features a typical director audio commentary track and straight-forward behind the scenes / making of featurette that runs about ten minutes and is presented in HD. This featurette, entitled “Mix It Up – Bringing MMA to the Big Screen,” discusses the four months or so of training Sean and Cam went through to get prepped for their on screen battles. Both actors, the director, and a producer chime in with what it was like to get ready for the film.
Also included were about a dozen deleted scenes, all introduced with a brief video of the director and his thoughts on the particularly scene. These are presented in HD, and combined, this Deleted Scenes feature runs about thirteen minutes.
“Blow By Blow: Breaking Down the Fights,” is a cool one hour feature with the director and a couple of his colleagues, including a fight choreographer. Accessing this feature can be done in three ways: enabling it and then watching the film, then pressing Enter on your remote whenever you see a punching bag icon, or you can choose individual or ‘Play All’ fights from the Special Features menu. Basically these guys go over about ten different fight scenes in the film and how they were made and various other anecdotes. Various parts of the fight scene are often rewound and/or paused while they make their comments. I thought this was a really interesting and well done feature.
Alternate Angle Fight Mode is similar to the “Blow By Blow” feature. You can access this feature in the same three ways as “Blow By Blow,” but rather than having commentary, the viewer chooses, with their remote, three alternate viewing angles of a particular fight scene, or, they can view a comparison split screen of all of the different views. I hadn’t seen a feature like this before; I thought it was clever and well used here.
That wraps up this Blu-ray release of Never Back Down.
