REVIEW: Never Back Down

March 15, 2008 – 6:23 pm by fightlinker

So me and Jake went out to see Never Back Down, and it was pretty much exactly what I was expecting. Rather than write some long winded thesis on the movie from the perspective of a film critic, let me qualify it in a more useful manner for you:

Action: For a movie that lasted like 110 minutes, there wasn’t really enough fighting. I think through the whole thing there were maybe 5 fight scenes. The quality was okay, some neat camera tricks and ‘first person perspectives’. But as seems to be the case in all movies nowadays, a lot of the cuts were too quick for you to really see what was going on. Still, the beatdowns were well shot and satisfying (although not nearly as awesome as Rambo’s 5 minute gattling gun finale). 3/5

Babes: There was a decent amount of good tail floating around, especially at the first party. But the main love interest was like a chubby Jessica Alba … her face is practically a circle and she has thunder thighs. The movie didn’t spend enough time molesting all the chicks like they do in The Fast and The Furious and other ‘teen scene’ flicks, but I guess since this is supposed to be a high school flick they might have thought that was creepy. But hey, creepy or not, they shoulda shown more skanks wearing very little instead of blowing their load in the first party scene. 3/5

Cheese: Cheese factor is off the hook … a whole bunch of terrible lines that are just aching to be made fun of. Anyone who’s into MMA will get a kick out of the namedropping and attempts to be factually correct. While they got the terminology right, it’s still better than watching your Grandmother talking Gangsta - it’s just side splittingly wicked. 4/5

Overall: 3.5 / 5

Don’t go into this movie expecting it to be some kind of lifechanging experience, and don’t expect it to ‘represent the sport’ because the movie is more about felony fights than actual mixed martial arts. But if you go with some friends (preferably drunk), you’ll probably have a good time.