A troubled youth is not good at controlling his temper and gets into fights. He and his family move to Florida and instead of turning over a new leaf he only finds more people to fight with. He also finds a muscular Mr. Miyagi to train him in the ways of mixed martial arts.
Jake Tyler (Sean Faris) and his family have moved to Orlando, Florida so that his little brother can attend a tennis academy on scholarship. Jake’s father was killed driving his car while drunk with Jake in the passenger seat. Jake’s never forgiven himself over his father’s death and this causes him to lash out at everyone – most likely resulting in him fighting.
Before the Tyler family left, Jake started a brawl on the football field and footage has found its way to the Internet. He arrives at his new school and it’s love at first sight when he sees Baja Miller (Amber Heard). He tries to save a fellow student, Max Cooperman (Evan Peters), from a fight but instead of being grateful Max pushes him away and continues the fight, which turns out to be a street-fighting match.
Baja invites Jake to a party and he’s delighted, but it turns out that her boyfriend Ryan McCarthy (Cam Gigandet) has lured Jake to his mansion to challenge him as the Internet video of Jake’s football brawl has spread around the school.
Ryan is the current “beat down” king and wants to draw Jake into a fight at the party, which he does by mentioning Jake’s father. Jake’s hot-headed style soon gets him beat down by the “beat down” king, but Jake swears that he’ll join a fight competition to get his revenge on Ryan.
Max suggests that Jake join Jean Roqua’s (Djimon Hounsou) gym to hone up on his mixed martial arts skills.
The Karate Kid reference in the opening of the review is not exactly lost on the filmmakers as they have Faris crack a Miyagi joke early on. The film feels like it takes ques from many sports movies and not just the kid of karate, or course with a large dose of music video flavor.
It did amuse me how several characters get the crap beat out of them, but they still end up coming out of it looking buff and having exceedingly white teeth. Especially one who takes a brutal slow-mo blood spewing blow and his teeth look perfect in the next scene – hilarious.
This two-disc set offers the film in both a rated and unrated edition. Director Jeff Wadlow provides a 23 second introduction to the unrated cut that only several shots add some more to achieve the unrated moniker, indeed the running times (1 hour 53 minutes) only differ in the slightest.
That’s probably another downfall in that if you’re aiming such a film at a certain age group two hours seems about half an hour too long. It seems obvious that they’re aiming to a teenage population by the amount of pop music that they put in the film.
So much so that some of it seems like a music video – with lots of fighting. I guess if you’re into the fighting then you might like the film, but the storyline is pure corn.
Never Back Down is presented in anamorphic widescreen (2.40:1) and is enhanced for 16x9 televisions. Disc one includes a commentary with director Jeff Wadlow, Sean Faris, and writer Chris Hauty. Next are 13 minutes of deleted scenes with introductions by Wadlow. Finally, the disc has a 90 second promo that Wadlow made to shop the film around, which he also introduces.
Disc two has the 10 minute “Mix it Up” which talks about how the production brought mixed martial arts to the screen. The 64-minute “Blow by Blow” breaks down all the fights in the film. The 2-minute “Star Power” talks to Djimon about the training required for the film. The 1-minute “The Thrill of the Fight” is about choreographing the fights. Finally, the 2 minute “Training the Cast” interviews the cast members about the intense training they had to go through.
A cast of beautiful people decides to beat the hell out of each other to a music video beat. Fans of the film will have a lot of special features to digest on this two-disc edition, but others might get a case of indigestion from the derivative movie.
Never Back Down (Extended Beat Down Edition) is now available at Amazon . It is available for pre-order at AmazonUK for an Aug. 18th release. Visit the DVD database for more information.
There are currently no comments for this article. Be the first to comment! (no registration required)