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Jeff Wadlow, Never Back Down
03/14/2008 Every once in a while, a movie comes along that you have such low expectations for, that you expect to fail on virtually every level, it manages to rise above those reservations and, for the most part, work for the type of film it is. While the previews may portray it as being a high school knockoff of Fight Club with acting about as believable as what you’d see in The Fast and the Furious, Never Back Down is a surprisingly watchable movie that fails to collapse within itself like you might imagine. Jake Tyler (Sean Faris) is the new guy on the block who has just moved to Orlando, Florida. He comes from a ‘significantly screwed up’ family that includes himself, his mother (Leslie Hope) and his little brother, Charlie (Wyatt Smith). Almost instantly, he locks eyes with the beautiful blonde Baja (Amber Heard), and he locks horns with the most popular guy on campus, Ryan McCarthy (Cam Gigandet). McCarthy is a bully keen to see Jake join his new league of fighters, even if it means he has to antagonize the crap out of him. And our story takes off from here. Now, all this may sound like your typical, cliched teen angst film that you could pretty much accurately predict in your sleep. Well, it is. Yes, most of the characters are one-dimensional, save for our protagonist and his sage of a trainer, Jean Roqua (Djimon Hounsou). Yes, a lot of popular music is pounded into the film’s soundtrack. Yes, the women play the same parts here that they do in every type of film like this (they’re minor characters that add little to no element of significance to the story). Yes, our hero does get the girl in the end, the bad guy gets his overly due beating, and everything is right with the world by the time we’re done. These flaws are prevalent in essentially all of these types of films, so their presence here is neither surprising nor entirely noteworthy. What keeps the film from being a complete waste of your time, however, is the acting. Sean Faris carries the film relatively well as the lead. Maybe it’s because his acting doesn’t seem too forced or over-the-top, or maybe it’s because he’s not fed too many horrible lines from Chris Hauty’s screenplay. Or, as my sister pointed out to me, maybe it has something to do with the fact that he bears such an eerie resemblance to Tom Cruise. In any event, while his character isn’t unlike any other we’ve seen in similar films, he doesn’t come across as phony, and this makes it easy for us to root for him. Cam Gigandet represents all that we’ve come to expect from every high school bad guy. He’s popular, handsome, athletic, cool, rich, and the boyfriend of the hottest and most popular girl in school. You could take his character and put him into virtually any film set in high school that has a major antagonist, and no one would know the difference. And yet, the scenes where Gigandet appears are arguably the most engaging moments on screen. He commands the camera with his spiteful eyes, his sinister smile, and his seemingly harmless yet altogether intimidating body language. It’s easy to hate him, probably even impossible not to, but you love hating him, and you want to see him working his malevolent charm in more scenes than you are afforded. If any other performer could steal the show from Gigandet, it would be Djimon Honsou. He, too, plays a character that is more or less textbook: the trainer. Jean Roqua is wise beyond his years, strict, and, of course, opposed to any violent actions his students perform out of his gym. But there is more to the teacher than meets the eye. He lives in the shadow of a tragic past that saw his brother murdered in front of him and led to his estrangement from his family and friends for seven years. Hounsou brings a depth to an otherwise generic character that allows for Roqua and his actions to seem genuine and believable. A few of the montage sequences between he and Faris’ character do border on being a little too mushy, but in the end, we’re able to align ourselves with the character and appreciate him, assuming we hadn’t before. The weakest roles belong to the female characters. There’s nothing particularly bad about Amber Heard’s performance as the love interest of the protagonist. But her character is so typical of every single female in these kinds of movies that you wonder if she will ever bring anything fresh to the role, and you’re disappointed when she doesn’t. As it is with more or less all female high love interests, Baja is the major cause of the friction between the hero and the villain. And like those characters, she is somehow the girlfriend of the jerk, even though it’s quite obvious she likes the new guy more. Yet, she stays with the boy who’s wrong for her, or at least for a while, because. . .he’s popular too? Your guess is as good as mine. That part of the equation is never explained, maybe because no good, solid answer could come out of it. Baja basically just acts as a cheerleader for our protagonist as he mentally readies himself to do battle with Ryan, yelling out Jake’s name when the two actually fight, though I don’t know how much of a difference that made. By the same token, Leslie Hope, who once played Jack Bauer’s wife on TV’s 24, is not bad in her role as the mother either, but what does she add? Her character is not annoying or unbelievable, and Hope plays her with the right amount of calm and restraint. But if you took her out of the film altogether, it would not change the outcome. She forbids Jake from continuing in his training, though that does no good, since he’s back the next day, and she’s non the wiser. She meets with the trainer to sort through what is allowed and what isn’t, being promised her son would wear a mouthguard. Yet, she seems to stop herself short of being firm with Roqua, backing down easily and seeming to forget what her purpose for finally meeting him was. Additionally, when Jake fights Ryan, there’s not a mouthguard in sight. The female characters just aren’t fleshed out as well as they should have been. The actresses are engaging, but not as much as their male co-stars. So, in essence, part of the reason the women in the story aren’t as strong is due to the performers, and the other part of the blame should be placed on the screenplay. Never Back Down is nothing new, earth-shattering, or innovative. In fact, it uses basically all of the elements necessary for a teen angst fighting drama, deciding fairly on not to refine these conventions to produce something we’ve never seen before. But, for the most part, the acting allows for us to coast through those faults and view the film for what it is. It’s not meant to be anything extraordinary, just your typical movie, which it is. It’s average, nothing more and nothing less. Comments [post a comment]
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Never Back Down Cinema Review Jeff Wadlow Sean Faris