Karate Kid Grows Up

Never Back Down Directed by Jeff Wadlow

It’s easy to deride the Karate Kid formula of Never Back Down: white teenager learns self-defense skills and emotional discipline from man of color with a mysterious past. Fact is, the inspirational message of this new action flick isn’t as tightly structured as John Avildsen hokum. But Never Back Down rises above formula in the way Jake Tyler (Sean Faris) walks alone when transferred to his new Orlando, Fl., high school. Jake’s physical confidence contrasts with his new-kid wariness. Sean Faris may look like a beefy young Tom Cruise, but he already has the emotional shading it took Cruise years to develop. There’s original characterization in the alternating currents of Jake’s pride and caution. Still suffering his father’s recent death, trying to handle feelings he can’t express, Jake’s control of his swiftly maturing adolescent body is a richer subject—more immediately sensual and cinematic—than anything Karate Kid offered.

Thrown into a new social environment after busting heads on his former school’s football team, Jake’s confrontation with the decadent luxe of Orlando’s sun-drenched upper middle class is less like Rocky’s bootstrap story than the ethical dilemmas of a headstrong, fast-draw kid gunslinger in a western. Jake’s lit-class comments on The Illiad impress Baja (Amber Heard), the smart but insecure girlfriend of golden-haired bad boy Ryan (Cam Gigandet). Ryan is the picture of narcissism who draws Jake into the bloodthirsty Mixed Martial Arts underground. Mindful of The Illiad’s less vainglorious attitude to warfare leads Jake to John Roqua, an enigmatic MMA coach (played by Djimon Hounsou), who teaches him that home and family—symbols depicted on Achilles’ shield—are what’s worth fighting for.

I set out these story details because they’re the basis of director Jeff Wadlow’s visually stunning genre make-over. Never Back Down’s self-aware style is simply more interesting than its familiar conventions. Wadlow, screenwriter Chris Hauty and cinematographer Lukas Ettlin work to heighten the meanings and aesthetics of a hoary genre. When a miserably inept western remake like last year’s 3:10 to Yuma gets praised for attenuating Hollywood formula, what Wadlow does is worth distinguishing. It combines jock uplift and western elements with the eroticized psychology of Rebel Without a Cause and many of the images (Baja’s hair blowing in the afternoon sun, Jake seen pacing in his bedroom window with the eerily empty street nearby) are worthy of what Nicholas Ray could achieve. Plus, there’s a creative rhythm to the fight sequences, which are finger-snapping more than bone-cracking.

Most of all, Wadlow and Ettlin highlight their actors’ characterizations. The superb combination of genes and youth makes every face-off and grappling bout seem not only well lit but also star-crossed. Each personality type becomes a cinematic ideal. Faris and Gigandet look like museum quality jocks, but they are also recognizable figures of hormonally peaked physical living: the teenager wound-up with stress. Their performances are clearer, more readable than the kids in Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park; understanding their anxieties isn’t an offshoot of fashionable political moods, it’s the result of narrative clarity—a benefit of the genres Wadlow uses. I hesitate to call them beautiful only because that adjective has been shamed by critics who accept Van Sant’s pandering and abuse the term ‘beautiful boys.’ They’ve forgotten how to read genre movies but accept Van Sant’s leering sentimentality—what Travis Bickle called ‘morbid self-attention.’

The beauty of healthy physical release is the incorruptible point of Djimon Hounsou’s performance. With his dark skin, white goatee and precise expressions, Hounsou remains Hollywood’s finest camera subject. Roqua’s advice (“Everyone has their fight”) feels uniquely personal. His fight is the same as Jake’s, which lifts the Morgan Freeman Million Dollar Baby sagacity out of cliché and gives it Olympic beauty. A scene of Jake and his friend Max (Evan Peters) side by side, chewing cheekfuls of French fries roots Never Back Down in the non-jock world of teenage folly while Jake and Baja’s lovers’ quarrel is cleverly pared down to one-word, bright-kids’ challenges—ending brilliantly with a go-with-the-flow euphemism. Maybe it’s just a genre picture, but scene after scene in Never Back Down displays vitality and wit. This is the year’s first good-looking and fully enjoyable American movie.