If 2010's stirring, raw, passionately written and performed "The Fighter" was something of a modern-day answer to Martin Scorsese's 1980 boxing opus "Raging Bull," then "Warrior" is this year's answer to 2009's "The Blind Side." An immature, contrived, sap-infested drama of feuding family members, feel-good histrionics and mixed martial arts, the film opens with a certain cautious promise before falling into rote, melodramatic formula. It's a shame watching the cast act their hearts out while nothing around them is working. The longer it goes—and at 139 minutes, it goes on forever without adequately developing the characters' relationships and their pouty interpersonal gripes—the more insanely moronic, supremely annoying and egregiously manipulative it dares to become. If writer-director Gavin O'Connor (2008's "Pride and Glory") and his co-writers Anthony Tambakis and Cliff Dorman have achieved anything, it's in successfully rubbing this viewer the absolute wrong way.
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