#15 - Never Back Down (-1 of 10)

Never Back Down is essentially Fight Club minus every admirable point. In fact, with its thin characters and derivative plot, the finished product seems more like a marketing concept than an actual film.

Brooding teen Jake Tyler (played by Sean Faris, who resembles a young Ben Affleck) relocates with his mom and little brother to Orlando. Jake had gotten into a brawl on the high-school football field back home, and his rep as a fighter has followed him to the family's new digs. 
Apparently, Jake's fight was such a riveting event that everyone under 17 in the entire country viewed the video on the Internet. What did bad scriptwriters do before the Web?

Jake struggles to fit in at his new school. Things come to a head when he winds up in a brawl with a bully named Ryan (Cam Gigandet, looking more than a few years past graduation). After getting pummeled, Jake is drawn into the world of mixed martial arts.

Under the guidance of a wise mentor named Mr. Miyagi, er, Jean (Djimon Hounsou of Blood Diamond), Jake learns to fight by the rules and to grow up emotionally. Heck, he even attracts the attention of a pretty blonde at school.

Obviously, the movie is squarely aimed at pumped up youths with no sense of shame. That's fine, but the audience still deserves characters that are fleshed out and a plot that shows some flashes of originality.

Don't look for that here. All the characters are stock types, down to Jake's nerdy little sidekick (an unappealing Evan Peters). The worst off is Hounsou, who's stuck offering the kind of platitudes not heard since Kung Fu went off the air.

Director Jeff Wadlow shows little imagination with a bad script. This is the kind of film in which the fighting sequences are filmed in slow motion. Sometimes, that's exciting; here, it only makes them seem duller - and longer.