11/13/2022 0 Comments Here comes the boom fightersI still wouldn’t advise against watching it, and I’ll try to explain why without spoiling too much. The bad news is that, well, there’s a reason why “Fight Valley” is rated 2.6 on IMDB. So it’s nice that young girls everywhere get to see that they can be anything, even backyard brawlers with inexplicably persistent eyeliner and on-the-nose street names. Given my references growing up, I was pretty sure that the market on washed-up fighters with a chip on their shoulder training grief-stricken apprentices to avenge the loss of a loved one was cornered by men. “Fight Valley,” directed by Rob Hawk (2016) Here comes the boom fighters movie#All you have to do is swap the Members Only jackets for Affliction shirts, update the music and the hairstyles, and you have yourself a barely serviceable copy of a movie that was much better the first time - when it actually had some heart. And if that’s all you want to do, why take the trouble to write a new story? So much easier to just borrow one that’s already worked before. This movie feels like some studio executives heard that MMA was popular with the kids and they decided they’d better get something out there quickly in order to capitalize on it. It also dispenses with the humor of “The Karate Kid,” choosing instead to take itself Very Seriously while giving us a glitzy world that’s essentially “Beverly Hills, 90210” with leg kicks. That’s the plot of both movies, except that “Never Back Down” throws in some cell phones and viral video here and there as a sort of half-assed social commentary. Naturally, there’s also a girl involved and a big martial arts tournament to settle things at the end. I’d say that accurately describes the enormous debt that 2008’s “Never Back Down” owes to 1984’s “The Karate Kid.” This is the story of a teenage boy who moves to a new school where all the cool kids do martial arts, which they then misuse in order to bully him - until, that is, he finds a mystical immigrant mentor (here it’s Djimon Hounsou, the only believable actor in the film) who teaches him to fight back. Roger Ebert once wrote that “most movies are constructed out of bits and pieces of other movies, like little engines built from cinematic Erector sets.” This is mostly true, but occasionally there comes a movie that just is another movie, lifted out as one big chunk and placed down on a slightly different set. “Never Back Down,” directed by Jeff Wadlow (2008) (NOTE: Also be sure to check out The Athletic’s top 100 sports movies of all time.) Here’s our guide to the best (and worst) MMA movies out there. What we discovered? The same thing that Frank Dux did when he put his trust in the ancient ways of ninjitsu in “Bloodsport” - even if we were temporarily blinded by what we were up against, we learned to truly see. At a time when we’re stuck at home with nothing much to do, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to check in on what Hollywood thinks of MMA. We didn’t let that stop our group of MMA writers at The Athletic from going back and revisiting some of the MMA films that are out there.
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