Home > Chicago Movies > Movie Review > Never Back Down

At a posh Orlando high school, sunshine, big houses and girls in bikinis aren't enough to keep the dudes occupied, so they casually beat the stuffing out of each other for fun. As a result, new kid Jake Tyler (Sean Faris, promising), still struggling with the knowledge that he could have prevented his dad's drunk-driving death, becomes motivated to train with a mixed martial-arts expert (Djimon Hounsou) and stand up to the type-A, full-fledged jackass fighting champ (Cam Gigandet, the apparent love child of Brad Pitt and Paul Walker).

Big question: Is this just an MTV version of "Fight Club" for 18-year-olds with too much testosterone?

Catch it: In between the better-than-usual training montages, fist-pumping hard-rock soundtrack and lines like, "He's got crazy skills," "Never Back Down" does, in fact, have some meat on its bones. It's about a kid finding an outlet for his anger while learning the difference between a victory and a beating, and that one of the many reasons people feel like fighting is other people's desire to watch it.

Skip it: If you think unusually named children always like their names, as Jake's love interest Baja (Amber Heard) explains she's only named Baja because her parents smoked too much weed. Jeez, doesn't everyone know the best time to pick baby names is after a long night of drinking?

Bottom line: Yes, "Never Back Down" is cliche, acts like high-school kids rule the world and sometimes looks like a Three Doors Down video. But there's value in learning what you need to do and when you need to do it--a lesson seen through the camera phones, video cameras and YouTube pages that now pass for transmission of info among teenagers.

Bonus: Baja tells Jake that his handwriting is harder to read than "The Iliad." It proves that chicken scratch is actually much more sophisticated than people realize!

Video: Watch the review of 'Never Back Down'

What do you think of 'Never Back Down'? Email me: mpais@tribune.com

Add a comment