Beatdown (2010)

This is part two of the Punchfight Mountain Dew Challenge. For more of the details, you can check out my post on Circle of Death, which was part 1. By the time we got here, I was already close to two hours into an afternoon of nothing to eat but Doritos and Mountain Dew. I was feeling a little off, I was jittery, but I was excited to see what this film had in store for me.

Beatdown stars Apocalypto's Rudy Youngblood as a dude who makes a living in the underground fight circuit with his brother, who bets on him. His brother is into a loan shark, and after he's killed, the loan shark tells Rudy he needs to pony up the cash. He skips out and moves in with his father, DTVC favorite Danny Trejo, who lives in a small town. As luck would have it, the small town has their own underground fighting circuit, and he sees an opportunity with UFC faighter [sic] Michael "The Count" Bisping to make the money back his dead brother owes. His priorities change, though, when he meets a nice girl in town and falls in love. Now he's fighting to make enough so she and he can move away and start a new life together.



Before we get too far in, I should say that this was not the film to see when my stomach wasn't right after the food I put into it. This might be the most egregious offender of the gimmicky MTV camera effects and whatnot. It was all shaky and jumpy and blurry-- I thought I was going to be sick. Two big things happened that totally betrayed this film. First would be the aforementioned gimmicks; and second would be this device they used for the first two characters, Brandon (Youngblood), and the loan shark. They froze the film, then put their character names on the screen. Really, I needed that, especially with "Brandon", whose name is mentioned five or six times after that in an introductory capacity. See, if you don't think your script is written well enough for us to pick up on what the characters' names are organically, why should we? If you don't think your film is directed well enough, acted well enough, choreographed well enough, has a compelling enough story to keep us interested without these MTV-style gimmicks, why should we? Why should we even take it seriously, right?

And that's too bad, because the people making this should have trusted themselves. This was a pretty decent deal. Youngblood was good, Trejo was good, the story worked-- and was written plenty well enough for us to pick up on the character names without freezing the screen and posting it for us-- and I loved the use of Balfour as the heel. On top of that, the relationship between Youngblood and Susie Abromeit was such a great change of pace from the usual Punchfighting movie paradigm of just get the hottest chick possible, and get her naked as soon as possible. I mean, when I watched the featurette afterwards, I was disappointed that I missed how good a lot of the scenes could have been without those silly gimmicks. If you're going to go the gimmick route, why not go all the way? Have Youngblood's character be named Beatdown and take his girlfriend from a casting call of Hooters waitresses. Have Eric Balfour's character blow up Danny Trejo's house with him in it. Hell, don't even cast Youngblood, bring in Tony Schiena or Hector Echavarria instead. "My name's Beatdown, and I fight to survive." "Oh Beatdown, let me get naked and we can have sex to this bad Disturbed derivative's power ballad!"



The only DTVC tagged actor in this film is one of our faves, Danny Trejo. I'm waiting for Netflix to get me Machete in February so I can review it, so hopefully this will hold everyone over until that happens. Anyway, there's nothing as awesome in Beatdown as Trejo giving Van Damme a foot massage in Desert Heat, it's pretty much a Trejo fastball, and what you expect is what you get. I'm good with that, though. Like I mentioned with Vinnie Jones in Locked Down, Danny Trejo is a ready made character, you know exactly what you're going to get when you cast him, and as such, we as an audience don't need much set up to get into his role.

I know what you're thinking, "Eric Balfour as an MMA fighter?" Think it, by all means. That's not the issue here. He makes the perfect heel. Ten years ago he was giving girls rides home in teen dramas, then in the next scene telling his football buddies he slept with her. He was ganging up on geeks and smaller guys with his buddies, and kicking their asses and tossing them into trash cans. Hell, he even played the Devil in a car commercial. For me, I didn't need to buy him as an MMA fighter, because you already had me at heel. We were just talking about Trejo being ready-made, and Balfour is the same thing. The moment he turns his head to reveal his face, he's a jerk, and our hero has to deal with him and his jerkiness. (I should point out, this is in no way an indictment on Balfour the person-- I'm sure he's very nice and has never beat up any geeks before.)



Finally, I want to discuss the casting decisions for the male and female leads. First, Rudy Youngblood, who is listed on imdb as 5'11'', but looks like he's probably more in the 5'7"-5'9" range-- I mean, Abromeit is listed as 5'7", and does she look four inches shorter in that picture? I like though, from the short guy's stand point (I'm 5'7" myself), that they went with Youngblood. He just went in there like a pit bull and jumped on these dude's throats before they knew what hit them. Then you pair him with Susie Abromeit, who is very pretty, but never gets naked-- I don't even know if she wears a skirt to be honest-- and isn't there simply to be Youngblood's eye candy. I'm not saying I don't love a good Maxim model who can't act and is only there to get buck wild, but it's nice to have a little change of pace every once in a while.

But therein lies the rub. Underneath all the potential depth and changes of pace that would have made this is a fun-- and more importantly semi-decent-- movie, there's all the bad gimmicks of edits and angles and effects that betray everything they talked about wanting to accomplish in the featurette. Plain and simple, if you don't think your movie is good enough without all of those bells and whistles, then why should we? I wasn't too high on Mountain Dew to not see that one.

For more info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1568323/