Positive Liberty

In a just universe, every auditorium showing Never Back Down would be surrounded by crime scene tape with uniformed police officers warning passersby to “Please step away from the movie, there’s nothing to see here.” Because there isn’t. This isn’t so much a motion picture theatrical release as an Afternoon Special horribly metastasized into something even more clichéd, more superficially moralistic and far, far less watchable. Constant Viewer is frankly shocked they bothered to use expensive film stock instead of easily erasable video tape for this pretend movie.

The characters are all morality-play level stereotypes: the troubled hero, his struggling, divorced mother, the cute girl, vapid but popular because (aside from being cute and vapid, that is) she dates the baddest, constantly smirking and, of course, most wildly popular bad ass at the local high school. For no reason, not that anything else in the movie makes sense, every student but our hero at this school comes from a fabulously wealthy family. If these kids walked past any of the old 90210 cast on the streets, they’d probably slip the poor guy a couple of bucks for, you know, like a charity latte or whatever, dude.

So why are these spoiled rotten, brain dead 20-something ‘kids’ even in a public high school? Or any school other than an acting school, for that matter. Who knows? Their idea of fun, fun, fun is mixed martial arts brawling promoted via YouTube and somehow organized to a level just a tad less cheesy and over the top than the WWF. There are, of course, no police in this world to stop such nonsense and, apparently, only one or two disapproving parents or school officials. Indeed, there are few grown ups of any sort and the few there are are themselves emotionally arrested like our hero’s martial arts teacher, a Caribbean expat with a chip on his own shoulder about dear old Daddy.

Did the producers of this monstrosity actually find that legendary room full of monkeys with typewriters? Certainly nothing in the dialog suggests otherwise. Nor does any of the directing, what little of it there appears to be in this smorgasbord of clichéd if not outright plagiarized set pieces. Even the crew should have demanded billing as Alan Smithee for this cinematic obscenity. Another reviewer posed the rhetorical question, “Haven’t we seen this movie before?” but the answer is hell no, not even the most cringe inducing scene from the most cringe inducing sequel to The Karate Kid or any of the probably hundreds of such stories over the years could manage to induce cringes like Never Back Down. By around twenty minutes into the film, the audience is literally begging for the obligatory final fight scene when our hero prevails – surprise! surprise! – against all odds and kicks the bad ass’s bad ass, the sooner the better so we can all get the hell out of there. Constant Viewer can’t recall the last time he has wasted the better part of a twenty and two hours of his life so thoroughly. At least not when the name M. Night Shyamalan wasn’t attached to the project.

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