Part of the problem with Never Back Down is its reliance on shakey handheld digital video, which makes the fight scenes about as confusing and aesthetically dull as a youtube street fight. But we can only blame so much of the movie’s failure on lips. Or Amber Heard, her downmarket MMA-loving equivalent. I know who I’d rather kiss if I was Elizabeth Shue.
Is there any character it can’t make more nuanced? It’s like insta-depth.) Sean Faris, the film’s Ralph Macchio analogue, is pretty bad… but to be fair, so is Macchio, whose only real edge is in the crucial field of puffy bee-stung lips. (Ah, the tragic death of a family member. It’s essentially the same role he played in Gladiator, only with a more maudlin backstory. Djimon “Love Will Never Do Without You” Honsou does fine in the Pat Morita role, although he doesn’t have much to work with. (They don’t, actually, but they keep shelling out money to watch them, which amounts to the same thing.) So what went wrong? Read my diagnosis after the jump, if’n you want. But I don’t think Hollywood is going to be banging down the writer’s door, hungry for more of that sweet sweet MMAsploitation. They recouped their shooting costs with the US box office receipts, so the foreign markets and DVD release should put the production comfortably in the black. Oh, it wasn’t a colossal flop or anything.
Take The Karate Kid, replace karate with Ultimate Fighting™, replace Pat Morita with Djimon Honsou, throw in a bunch of crappy pop-punk and some PG-13 T&A… it should be a license to print money, right? On paper, Never Back Down looked like a sure thing.
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