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Canberra Today 15°/18° | Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Warrior (M) ★ ★ ★ ½

A MIXED martial arts, cage-fighting contest with a winner-take-all, $5 million prize underlies Gavin O’Connor’s film. Its rules are simple.

No eye-gouging or scrotum twisting or kicking. Obey the referee’s orders: “Go to war”.

O’Connor’s screenplay well understands that a 140-minute film showing exclusively cage-fighting would have difficulty finding audiences.

So he gives “Warrior” a double whammy with credibly-delineated family issues.

Former prizefighter Paddy (Nick Nolte) lives alone, proud of not having drunk alcohol for 999 days. That’s the day his older son Tom (Tom Hardy) turns up after a decade’s unexplained absence seeking a trainer. Despite Paddy’s younger son, secondary school physics teacher Brendan (Joel Edgerton), and his wife having three jobs, the bank is about to foreclose.

All that prize-money and two brothers, each with compelling reasons for earning it, might point to a predictable outcome, but arriving there is a less discomforting cinema experience than it might have been. When men aren’t beating each other up to entertain a screaming audience of both sexes, resolving family issues forms a solid emotional foundation.

At all cinemas

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Ian Meikle, editor

Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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