MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND I PAID TO SEE SIDEKICKS

First off, if you've missed out on any of the previous Foycasts you can now find them all at Dread Central now that The Foycast has been officially added to their new built-in player list (LINK HERE). Just added this past month was the third installment: THE SEARCH FOR SCHLOCK. It's the most random Foycast yet as I just start looking around my bedroom for movie titles to talk about with Uncle Creepy. After kicking off this edition with what you'll no doubt agree to be the greatest intro music of all time, you'll get to hear nearly one full laugh-filled (and even a little cough-filled) hour of hacking phlegm, midgets in dog costumes, methane holocausts, window sex, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Billy Blanks, the hairiest Italian giant monster of them all, me repeatedly yelling "AAAARRRRHHHH!!!", and much more. You can also direct download an MP3 of FOYCAST III: THE SEARCH FOR SCHLOCK by CLICKING HERE.

I was originally planning to do a much longer Foyeurism this month called "March Badness" with the plan being to post reviews of several of this past month's less than stellar theatrical offerings ***cough***10,000 B.C.***cough*** but then opted to focus on one very deserving film in particular, a film I'd been chomping at the bit to see ever since first learning of its existence. This means next month you can expect a longer Foyeurism I'm planning to call "Unfinished Business" in which I'll stick it to four of this year's already come and gone stinkers. I might even have a suprise in store for you all. Until then, I have but three words to say to you...

NEVER BACK DOWN aka THE FIST & THE FURIOUS aka BEAT UP

For the longest time Jake Tyler would never back down. He wouldn't even let others back down. His mom desperately wished he would back down. Having been forced to move to a new town due to his inability to never not back down, Jake Tyler finally decides to back down. Then he ran afoul of Ryan McCarthy, a bully who never backs down and never allows any else to back down; he won't let Jake Tyler back down. Jake Tyler's inability to back down results in him getting beatdown and more scorn from his mom who insists that he stop never backing down.

Jake Tyler will begin to learn to back down after studying under a mixed martial arts trainer, a coach whose mantra is "Never back down!" Unless it involves never backing down outside of his class; there Jake Tyler had to back down. And when he failed to back down in a situation where the teacher who taught him to never back down ordered him to back down, he punishes Jake Tyler by forbidding him from never backing down in his dojo ever again. Banished, Jake Tyler refused to back down. After begging, pleading, and crying that he could not control his urge to never back down and wanting desperately to learn how to back down, the sensei who will soon reveal that he too once had a problem with never backing down, backs down. Jake Tyler is again allowed to never back down in his dojo, but on one condition: he must never not back down outside of class again.

Yet Ryan McCarthy still will not back down, now insisting Jake Tyler enter an underground tournament called "The Beatdown" where nobody can back down. The coach orders Jake Tyler to back down, but he could not back down, not after Ryan McCarthy beatdown his best friend just to goad him into competing in "The Beatdown". The student becomes the teacher as Jake Tyler teaches his teacher an important lesson he'd come to learn - no matter how much you want to back down, sometimes the only way one can back down is to never back down. Jake Tyler refuses to back down from "The Beatdown", doing so now with the blessing of his trainer who comes to understand that the only reason he wasn't backing down this time was in order to facedown Ryan McCarthy one last time so that he could finally become free to back down.

Fighting for his right to back down, Jake Tyler refuses to back down, beating down opponent after opponent. Then Ryan McCarthy got disqualified, eliminated from "The Beatdown", thus ensuring there would be no chance for Jake Tyler to beat him down. Now there was no reason for Jake Tyler to never back down and so he backed down, much to the shock and dismay of everyone in attendance at "The Beatdown" who expected him to never back down. When Ryan McCarthy demanded to know why he would back down now, Jake Tyler tells him he was backing down because he only entered "The Beatdown" for the chance to beat him down so that he could finally back down. Once again, Ryan McCarthy would not back down, jumping him in the streets outside "The Beatdown" for one final beatdown from which Jake Tyler cannot back down. It is here that Jake Tyler will finally beatdown Ryan McCarthy and at long last earn the right to back down - all because Jake Tyler would NEVER. BACK. DOWN.

Did you get all that? Feeling a little woozy? Perhaps even a bit baffled? Then try watching the motion picture play out while attempting to wrap your head around the underlying message of NEVER BACK DOWN, the hard-hitting (in more ways than one) drama depicting the struggles of a young man who loves to fight yet wants to stop fighting yet cannot stop fighting yet knows deep down that the only way he can finally stop fighting is to continue fighting. Much like the film's martial arts, the message is also mixed.

A dramatic recreation of THE KARATE KID reinterpreted as a clash between two warring underwear models ultimately battling it out for what amounts to little more than the YouTube fighting championship of the world (or at least Central Florida), this two-fisted teen angst fight flick could have easily been retitled THE MMA KID to suit 21st century audiences. Though given it comes to us from the director of the faux slasher flick CRY WOLF perhaps CRY UNCLE could have also worked. A moral quandary that wants to revel in sensationalistic PG-13 MMA violence while at the same time trying to preach the opposite (Aren't we all "The Condemned?"), another clear cut case of wanting to have your cake and eat it too; after spending 2/3rds of its running time trying to make-up its mind whether or not it's pro or con in the fighting good/fighting bad department, the writers of NEVER BACK DOWN decided to mix chocolate with peanut butter by stating that sometimes in order to not have to fight someone you have to fight them. Was this supposed to be the Bush Doctrine KARATE KID or what? I suppose there's some logic to the movie's decidedly mixed message somewhere in there. Sometimes fighting is the only way to walk away from a fight: let's see someone put that in a fortune cookie.

Attempting to teach us all a lesson about how fighting is the not the answer and then hammering that message home by having us watch the film's hero beat the ever-luvin' crap out of the bad guy; few things I find more humorously hypocritical than movies that preach non-violence as they revel in the action and excitement of watching people annihilate one another. That's just one of the many reasons why KARATE KID knock-offs rank amongst my favorite subgenres of film.

Hey, as classic a film as I believe THE KARATE KID to be there's no denying something's just a tad suspicious about its "Daniel-san, karate only for defense" proselytizing when every KARATE KID movie ends with someone karateing the snot out of someone else. Think about it. Mr. Miyagi repeatedly told Daniel-san that fighting was not the answer and then he stood on the sidelines in three different movies and watched as Daniel fought someone. Then he fed that malarkey to Hilary Swank and stood by and watched as she too started fighting and not even in a tournament setting either. And look what happened to her; she got the fight bug so bad she eventually got herself so crippled that Dirty Harry had to euthanize her. Wax on, wax off, my sweet patootie.

That's one of the many reasons why I love NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER so very much. No hypocrisy there. That film's message is that fighting is necessarily a bad thing because there are just some people in the world in the world in dire need of a major ass-whoopin'. But that's another Foyeurism for another day.

Sean Faris stars as emotionally wounded pretty boy Jake Tyler. Faris is a male model turned actor who made his debut in a David Decoteau film. I strongly suspect Mr. Decoteau would very much enjoy this film since it has almost as many male abdominal muscles on display as 300. I watch UFC and I can assure you that the majority of those ultimate fighters do not look like Calvin Klein models.

The Advocate magazine gives NEVER BACK DOWN 4 stars!

Jake Tyler is a very angry young man; his anger stemming from his guilt over his dad's fatal drunk driving accident. You see he knew his dad was drunk at the time but Jake Tyler backed down and gave him the car keys anyway. Sorry; I'm still trying to get that out of my system. Jake clearly failed to comprehend that the "friends don't let friends drive drunk" slogan also pertained to family members. Now dad's dead. This makes Jake Tyler very angry and you don't want to make Jake Tyler angry.

Making Jake even angrier is that his rivals just love taunting him with dead drunken dad cracks. The gleam Jake gets in his eyes, the expression he gets on his face whenever someone drops the dead drunken dad bomb on him, they might as well have gone full-on KILL BILL with a close-up of his face, a red tinted screen, and that siren sound effect. We're talking total Bruce Banner "hulking up" expressions when Jake flies into one of his violent rages. Jake keeps getting into fights, keeps getting kicked out of schools, and we're told he's even been arrested more than once. It's reached the point that his exasperated mom has to keep moving him and his kid brother just to get him into a new school.

Jake's kid brother is something of a child tennis prodigy, but nobody cares about tennis because it doesn't involve bonecrunching or bloodshed, at least not since John McEnroe retired. This will be the last I mention of him.

A football ball game slugfest sends the Tyler family packing again, this time leaving small town Iowa for big city Orlando, Florida. Just as KARATE KID saw a poor kid from Jersey moving to the lesser side of Beverly Hills, Jake Tyler from the humble surroundings of Iowa now finds himself living in the non-rich side of Orlando. Were you aware that Orlando has a super rich side that makes "The OC" look like a slum? If nothing else, NEVER BACK DOWN does have some educational value in terms of monetary geography.

Hawkeye Jake and his flannel shirt quickly finds himself the odd man out at Abercrombie & Fitch High, where all the guys look like underwear models and all the girls look like they stepped straight out of a Maxim Magazine spread. I don't know what the collective GPA of the students at this school is but if their grade point averages are as high as their body fat index is low then they make MIT look like ANIMAL HOUSE. Everyone is such a model of physical perfection, not only are there no fat kids in sight, not only are there no gawky teens to be seen, the only people who even wear glasses are the teachers - no doubt because they're old and non-beautiful. I swear the impossibly beautiful student body of this school is so comically photogenic it feels like a spoof, like that scene in LAST ACTION HERO where the kid commented to Arnold how every woman in movie California looked like a supermodel.

Enter the Zabka. What's the Zabka? The Zabka is the nemesis in a KARATE KID knock-off, named so after actor William Zabka who will forever be known for his villainous turn as the bully Johnny in THE KARATE KID. NEVER BACK DOWN'S "Zabka" is Ryan "The Terror" McCarthy, played with sneering MTV "reality show" pomposity by the wonderfully named Cam Gigandet. Yes; his character is actually introduced early on with the nickname "The Terror" before a fight. "The Terror" should have had Tyler as part of his name seeing as how Gigandet plays the role of Ryan McCarthy like Tyler Durden reborn as a narcissistic rich kid with a fighting fetish. CW Durden - that's what his name should have been seeing as how he's such an amalgamation of every teen CW Network drama rich pretty boy villain and Tyler Durden. If you can see his washboard stomach then it's already too late.

Cam Gigandet: President & Founder of the Paul Walker Abdominal Appreciation Society

The character really does comes across as a Tyler Durden wannabe who's watched FIGHT CLUB a million times but never got the point of the film other than thinking beating the crap out of one another sounds cool. Actually, that goes for most of the characters in NEVER BACK DOWN. They're like those teenage nimrods who like to post their pee-wee backyard street fighting crap on YouTube and think they're cool for doing so. NEVER BACK DOWN does at times appear to be trying to comment on this idiotic subculture but most of the time it just glorifies them.

Oh, yes, another thing worth mentioning about the youthful denizens of Orlando's rich side - if you don't have a camera phone that can play near DVD quality videos then you really don't have any reason to go on living.

Did I mention everyone not named Jake Tyler has incredibly wealthy parents in this film? Pretty much everyone not named Jake Tyler has incredibly wealthy parents in this film. Jake will get lured to a party at Ryan's mansion unaware of what was to come. Luxurious locale, the non-stop supply of scantily clad perfect bodies on display, the girl-on-girl hot tub exhibitionism, and the intergender fight clubbing going on: this party was just one special cameo appearance by Chris Tucker away from looking like a Brett Ratner's bar mitzvah.

Ryan reveals that the main event of this party is to be him in a knock down, drag out clash of the abdominal titans with Jake. Jake is confused. Ryan explains to him how everyone in the school has seen the YouTube video of his football fight. Ryan even compliments Jake on his pugilistic skills and then decrees that they must fight to prove who deserves the title of supreme high school bad ass. Jake remains confused. Jake Tyler attempts to back down, declaring that he doesn't want to fight Ryan or anyone else. Ryan asks him, "If you're not here to fight then why are you here?" Jake, slow on the trigger as he sometimes is, overlooks the obvious answer: "Music, drinks, girls: I'm here to party" His attempt to walk away is thwarted when Ryan drops the dead dad bomb on him. Jake hulks up. As Big John McCarthy would say, "Are you ready? Are you ready? Let's get it on!"

Alas, Jake Tyler's limited box skills are no match for Ryan "The Terror" McCarthy's superior MMA prowess. As Ryan so eloquently puts it before delivering the knockout blow to Jake's chiseled jaw, it had to end with Jake looking like a little bitch in front of everyone. Still the undefeated champion of the school, Ryan McCarthy celebrates heartily after having destroyed a seriously overmatched rival who didn't even know he was walking into a fight and actively attempted to walk away from the fight before being goaded into the fight. This irony is lost on Ryan who can only bask in the glory heaped upon him by his sycophantic schoolmates for having kept his unbeaten streak alive by beating back the ill-prepared challenge of a cornfed Iowa beefcake.

Beaten, betrayed, and humiliated, the joke of the school, help for Jake Tyler comes in the form of young Max Cooperman. He'll begin to bolster Jake's esteem by telling Jake him that showed tremendous heart what with the way he kept getting the crap kicked out of him and then kept getting back up to get more crap kicked out of him. Talking him up as the Yoshihiro Takayama of the Orlando high school fight club scene, Cooperman convinces Jake to join him at the mixed martial arts training school he attends.

Max Cooperman, the one person attending this high school who doesn't look like the model of physical perfection, a film geek with a digital camera in his hand at almost all times, filming damn near everything there is to film regardless of whether or not it's worth filming, as if he's in a constant state of readiness for the day when the CLOVERFIELD monster attacks Orlando, and we're supposed to believe this curly-haired dork trains in mixed martial arts? They cast a mop-headed guy who is more than a little on the doughy side and, quite frankly, if I say so myself, looks like he should be playing the school's stoner... He looks like a pot dealer, people! Yet we are told that he is an MMA junkie who himself trains in MMA. Sure, he's supposedly in the beginner's class, but still... From what we see of him at the dojo, he trains by watching and filming others training. We're also supposed to believe Max Cooperman's fighting skills make him a chick magnet too.

Future UFC Champion Max Cooperman

Enter the dojo of Jean Roqua, an African MMA instructor who trained in jujitsu with the world famous Gracie's of Brazil. If there's anyone who can teach you how to fight properly it would be Djimon Honsou; he fought alongside Maximus in the Roman Colosseum, you know? If there's anyone who knows a thing or two about gladiatorial style combat it would be him. This is why he will be the one character chosen to recite the film's title. "Never back down!" decrees Jean Roqua. It was that way of thinking that helped him gain his freedom in AMISTAD (and then go back to Africa to become a slave trader himself - the movie left out that rather important historical fact). So believable is Djimon Honsou in his role as the MMA instructor here that I found myself wishing the film was more about him having to kick butt and not the Tom Cruise wannabe starring as Hollywood's latest young rebel without a cause.

Seeing the bruises on his face and his overeager desire to learn how to be a better fighter ASAP makes Jean Roqua suspicious of Jake's true intentions for wanting to learn MMA. But Jake has heart and that's all that matters. Forget the beginner's class; Jake jumps head long into the advance class having never taken a single MMA class in his life. Because he's got heart. In a mere two months time Jake Tyler will go from being a temperamental street fighter to a highly skilled mixed martial arts fighter - still temperamental though. That might seem impossible, but remember - he's got heart, dammit!

Jean Roqua lays down the law: I catch you fighting outside of my class and I cast you out forever. After a particularly bad day filled with enough angst to build an entire CW Network hour-long drama around, Jake cannot contain his burning rage no more. That rage erupts into a case of road rage. Do not honk your car horn at Max Cooperman when Jake Tyler is in the car and he's had a bad day. That's exactly what a trio of Mexicans does at a stop sigh prompting Jake to jump out of the car ready to fulfill Lou Dobbs greatest desire. The three amigos will get out of their vehicle, daring the lone gringo to do something. Does he ever. Jake's rage combined with his vastly improved fighting skills allow him to single handedly annihilate the three men right there at a downtown intersection. Jake should probably consider himself lucky that he just happened to pick a fight with the only three angry Latinos in Florida that neither knew how to box nor carried any sort of guns or knives. They were probably so embarrassed to get their asses handed to them by this lone unarmed Caucasian that's why they didn't report this felonious assault to the cops.

Like everything fight related in this film, footage of this street brawl immediately makes it onto the web and camera phones all over the school. Within hours, suddenly, inexplicably, Jake goes from social pariah to the new king of cool. Do they have no other sports or pastimes at this school aside from watching people pound the crap out of one another? Apparently not, which is why Ryan becomes insanely jealous that the fighting skills of the punk bitch he rather easily beat into unconsciousness is now the talk of the school. He's now damned determined to beat Jake up a second time even after having destroyed him so easily the first time all because of this stupid video. Why not? Ryan's a prick and that's what pricks do. If he didn't then he'd just be kind of annoying and people are more likely to pay to watch a movie in which a prick get his butt whooped than a kind of annoying person. Otherwise, every Martin Laurence movie would end with him being beaten within an inch of his life. I know I'd go see more Martin Laurence movies if that were the case.

Here’s a thought. Why doesn't Ryan just try one-upping him? If Jake is Mr. Popular now because everyone saw that video of him beating up three Hispanics in traffic then imagine how much more popular Ryan would become if everyone saw a video of him walking onto a construction site and picking a fight with every undocumented Mexican worker he can find?

Now anyone who has ever seen THE KARATE KID knows there's really only one way to settle this feud - a tournament. It is tradition. It is the way of the underage warrior.

Hang on. I just realized that I've gone all this time and totally neglected to mention another major source of contention - the love interest.

Often looking very much like Kelly Bundy after being given an Eliza Doolittle makeover, the beautiful Amber Heard plays the love interest. She's very much attracted to Tyler's attractiveness; at least that's about the one explanation I can figure. She tells him she likes him because he's different from the other guys she knows, what with his flannel shirts and need to ask for directions, pretty much the only things discussed during their screen time prior to her being duped into duping him to show up actual boyfriend Ryan's party so that he could receive the mandatory asskicking in front of the love interest at the Zabaka's hands and feet.

He answered a question in class that she could not - that means he's smart.

He wears clothing that is not considered fashionable - that means he's not materialistic.

He's willing to ask her for directions to a classroom - that means he's humble.

She's in love!

Now would be a good time to mention her character's name is Baha... Baha Miller. You read that correctly - her name is Baha. She explains that her parents were pot-smoking hippies. Yeah, but what were the screenwriters smoking? She's what? All of 17? That would mean she was probably born in 1990. I don't think the pot-smoking hippie answer works anymore. Why not just have her respond that her parents were rich and/or famous and we all know rich and famous people these days like to give their children stupid names. Pilot Inspektor, Moxie Crimefighter, Audio Science Clayton, anyone? Baha Miller got off easy.

But she cannot use the rich parent answer because her parents were not filthy stinkin' rich, at least not that filthy stinkin' rich. In trying to earn Jake's forgiveness for setting him up a beating a Ryan's hands and feet, the bodacious Baha will tell Jake that she too came to this school from the wrong side of the tracks and in no time flat she became little miss popular and began dating the top jock, Ryan. Deep down she longs to escape the virtually inescapable high school caste system that dictates that she must remain the property of the upper crust that made her the queen bee she is lest she be ostracized and booted down to dwell amongst the plebeians she once ruled over. Baha knows the score; she saw what happened to Cordelia's social life on "Buffy, the Vampire Slayer" after she began dating that high school loser Xander and doesn't want it to happen her.

She may want to break up with Ryan, increasingly turned off by his cruelty and watching him bask in the pleasure he derives from hurting others, she nonetheless remains with him, though unhappily so. A couple scenes where she sits scouring next to a sneering Ryan, might as well have just dressed her in that slave girl outfit with a chain around her neck like the one Jabba the Hut make Princess Leia wear.

Baha eventually breaks up with Ryan. Jake doesn’t want to back down from his resentment matter but their mutual sexiness simply could not be denied. I guess spending all that time rolling around on a canvas with half-naked men helped spark his latent heterosexuality.

Roqua too has seen Jake's 3-on-1 Latino smackdown and being that he's neither Lou Dobbs nor Pat Buchanan he does not approve and kicks Jake out of his gym forever. Jake's plan for getting back into class involves stalking his teacher for a full day until he finally gets a chance to corner him in the fresh vegetables section of the supermarket and proceeds to cry his eyes about his dead dad, his inner angst, and the uncontrollable rage that dwells within him. Fortunately for Jake, it'll turn out that Roqua also knows the pain of guilt over losing a loved one; he was involved in a Brazilian bar fight that cost the life of his brother and led to his father disowning him. Roqua forgives Jake and allows him to come back. Remember, folks; JAKE HAS HEART~!

Jean Roqua trains for his upcoming fight with the NOMAD satellite.
Because sometimes logical paradoxes just aren't enough!

The extent of the Jake Tyler-Jean Roqua relationship can be summarized as follows: pleading, training, arguing, more training, temper tantrum, begging for forgiveness, yet more training, becoming best of buds, even more training, some more arguing, and finally, a heartfelt crying session that plays about as authentic as the one Spider-Man and Sandman had at the end of SPIDER-MAN 3.

It's amazing how this film nails nearly all the clichés of the KARATE KID subgenre right down the line to the point you can identify similar plot points taken straight from the KARATE KID only given a little window dressing to not seem like a blatant copycat. For example, Jake and Roqua's kicking of the heavy bag with such force it gets knocked across the room is this film's version of Mr. Miyagi and Daniel's catching flies with chopsticks. It also doubles as the climactic crane kick since this same style of kick is what Jake will use to finish off the bully. Let's not forget about their being plenty of montages: training montages, fighting montages, slice of life montages, etc.

What's missing though is any genuine sense of mentoring or friendship between the two. Often times, Jean Roqua's relationship to Jake Tyler feels less like teacher-student or best of friends and more like he's Jake court-appointed full contact guidance counselor.

Too bad they didn't also see fit to fill the soundtrack with peppy pop songs tailored perfectly to what we were witnessing at the time either. Most of the film's musical selections consist of recent popular songs and those that feel like they'd be playing on a Grand Theft Auto radio station dedicated to angry teenagers. Nothing, however, achieves the same reaction as "Moment of Truth" or "You're The Best" from THE KARATE KID or the stirring theme song to NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER or even the Kumite theme song from BLOODSPORT. Heck, not even a little ditty that delivers the majesty as the "Never Surrender" song at the end of KICKBOXER.

Mom (Leslie Hope, the late Mrs. Jack Bauer) continues to be appalled knowing her eldest son is still involved with fighting even if it is in a controlled environment. That is until she pays Mr. Roqua a visit at his dojo to register her complaint; he gives her a mouth guard to give to Jake to protect his teeth and just like that everything is hunky dory. This subplot resolved; mom is now down with the ground and pound.

The writers of NEVER BACK DOWN have decided to pull a reverse KARATE KID on us here; it's actually the bully who wants the underdog to compete in a tournament knowing full well that somehow the two of them will end up in the finals to face-off against one another. But the kicker here is that Jake doesn't want to fight Ryan or enter any tournament. After heavy-handed bathroom persuasion fails to convince Jake to compete in a secret underground Orlando-based fighting tournament called "The Beatdown", Zabka Bin Laden and his Abxis of Evil ups the ante to physical violence by beating Max Cooperman within an inch of his life and leaving the dork's mangled remains on Jake's doorstep. Call the cops? No. Take Max to the emergency room? Yes. Go home, grab your gear, and head to the nightclub where "The Beatdown" is going down? You betcha.

But first, Jake has to pay Jean Roqua a visit to let him know why he's going to break his cardinal rule. He tells him he has to fight Ryan McCarthy on this night - by first laying waste to several other scheduled tournament opponents - because if he doesn't he'll never be able to not fight him. The cycle of violence has to stop and the only way to stop it is with more violence. There’s your ultimate lesson, kids: the best way to keep from having to fight others is to have proven yourself to be such a bad ass that nobody wants to mess with you, and if doing so means you have to kick the crap out of a lot of people you really have no beef with just to get to the one you do, so be it. NEVER BACK DOWN: the neocon KARATE KID.

“The Beatdown”: Jake keeps winning, Ryan keeps winning, the hip-hop announcer rarely shuts up, five trillion different alternative and rap songs play during the fight montages, Jake suffers a rib injury, Ryan gets disqualified in the semi-finals for eye gouging an opponent, and Jake decides to quit since he was only there for the chance to fight Ryan.

Jake gives Ryan his reasons for fighting and not fighting speech that we've already heard with an extra layer of scolding directed at how Ryan only cares about the limelight he receives from others watching him beat people up. The writers were again trying to make a statement here about those moronic backyard fight clubbers that post their videos on the internet and once again the writers killed their point dead when everyone inside the club comes running out with their camera phones to watch and record the parking lot smackdown that breaks out when Jake jumps Ryan.

ROADHOUSE: THE COLLEGE YEARS

The final battle between Jake Tyler and Ryan McCarthy is an epic battle, like the climactic showdowns from ROCKY IV and KING KONG VS. GODZILLA all rolled into one. Ryan breaks Jake's already injured ribs, an injury that would no doubt put down any normal human being. But Jake Tyler is no normal human being. Jake Tyler will never back down. Broken ribs be damned; Jake Tyler has heart and heart trumps broken ribs, punctured lungs, and whatever other internal injuries Jake no doubt had by this point in the fight. Reborn anew like the phoenix rising from the ashes, Jake rallies. Ryan staggers. Then comes the coup de grace - Jake Tyler unleashes a powerhouse roundkick to the side of Ryan McCarthy's skull that strikes with a magnitude 1000 times more powerful than that of the Hiroshima bomb.

DOWN GOES MCCARTHY!
DOWN GOES MCCARTHY!

Goliath has been slain! McCarthyism is no more! The reign of "The Terror" is over! The Zabka has been defeated! Jake Tyler is victorious! Now he is free to fight no more. Now he has the respect of his peers and his most hated rival. Max Cooperman has been avenged. Jean Roqua can now return to his homeland to make peace with his father. Everyone in the Tyler family is happy. Jake and Baha are free to date without fear of reprisal. All was well.

Now if you read my blog several months back when I first witnessed the might and majesty of the trailer for NEVER BACK DOWN and declared that NEVER BACK DOWN could very well be the greatest motion picture of all time, you're probably wondering if I felt it lived up to that hype. Could any film live up to that hype? In this case, no. Of course it didn't. How could it? Wanna know the main reason why I am not ready to hail NEVER BACK DOWN as the movie event of a lifetime? 117-minutes. 117-minutes? That's three minutes shy of two hours. Why in god's name is this movie just a hair under two hours in length? Let me tell you something. There's only one KARATE KID kind of movie that should ever clock in at around 120-minutes and that's THE KARATE KID.

NEVER BACK DOWN has a serious problem; somewhere along the way, some way, somehow, the people involved in its making got it in their head that they were actaully making a good movie and not just an entertaining bit of junk like THE FAST & THE FURIOUS: TOKYO DRIFT or REDLINE or any number of other KARATE KID knock-offs that have come along over the years. Instead of a streamlined retelling of a tale we've seen a zillion times before just given an updated coat of paint we get a bloated exercise in vacuous Gen-Y pathos that did not need to be so. The amount of bickering and moping should never rival the amount of time dedicated to training and fighting.

Case in point, SHOWDOWN, a great little 1993 KARATE KID retread starring Billy Blanks as a policeman who kills a troublemaker in the line of duty and becomes so racked with guilt that he gives up his life as a cop to become a live-in janitor at a high school. Thank goodness he did because a new kid who comes to town who looked remarkably like a less magazine coverboy version of Sean Faris comes to town and immediately finds himself in KARATE KID territory. He falls for a pretty girl played by the current Mrs. Ben Stiller who happens to have a boyfriend who is big into martial arts and none to happy with the new guy making goo-goo eyes at his ex-gal. Several beatdowns later, Billy Blanks comes to the rescue and teaches him the martial arts, though his main method of self-defense for most of the film will involve kicking his bullies in the balls. Sweetening the pot, it'll turn out the school bully is also involved in a local underground teenage BLOODSPORT racket that's fronted by the evil brother of the con Blanks killed at the beginning of the film. This way we get double the comeuppance at the end when the kid finally gives the bully what he has coming and Billy Blanks regains his honor by whooping the evil brother's butt in front of pretty much the entire student body.

Or how about the much more obscure COLLEGE KICKBOXERS from 1990? What a title, huh? But a damned fun film! This gem is THE KARATE KID goes to college. The Daniel LaRusso of this one is played by a guy who looks like he could have been playing the bully in any other film. His Wham-era George Michaels' fashion sense does him no favors, nor does having him romance a female student who often looks like she might actually be in her forties. He and his spandex-loving token black best friend are constantly being harassed by a pack of racist, kung fu, goth punk-looking gangbangers. Our hero has some martial arts training but not enough. Fortunately, the Asian chef at the Chinese restaurant where the good guy works turns out to be a bonafide Iron Chef and the secret ingredient is always a can of whoop ass. From there - much like NO RETREAT, NO SURRENDER, that’s a future Foyeurism for another day.

You know what else those two movies had in common? Neither of them ran longer 95-minutes and the people that made them knew to keep'em light, keep'em breezy, and they didn't try to make anything more out of them then what they were to begin with.

The people responsible for NEVER BACK DOWN actually got it in their heads that they were going to make a KARATE KID for a new generation that would appeal to those that watch the CW Network and the faux reality shows that litter MTV nowadays and it was going to be a good piece of dramatic cinema with a socially conscience message to boot. Huge mistake, especially considering that every relevant point they tried to make they found a surefire way to contradict it. Admittedly, most of the fight scenes are pretty darn good and plenty of the clichéd stuff plays pretty damn funny. Even the misguided morality, confused messages the script hurls at us, and insane degree of superficiality that permeates every aspect of the production also contributes to the schlock factor. But again, and I have to keep coming back to this - this movie shouldn't have been any longer that 95 minutes, tops. Too many arguments with mom about fighting, too many arguments with mom about how he may be a negative influence on the little brother who matters so little to the film, too many terse moments with Baha even though we all know they're going to end up together anyway, too many conversations with Jean Roqua about his inner turmoil or their mutual pain, too many moments of Jake just being sullen - just too many prolonged moments of counterproductive gravitas that hurt the pacing and took away from the cheese factor. There's even an unnecessary scene showing us Ryan's prick of a father giving his son a hard time that's supposed to make us feel that it's not entirely Ryan's fault that he's a violent douchebag. None of that drama resonates anyway so why dwell on it so? I'd say save the drama for your mama but NEVER BACK DOWN actually does save entirely too much drama for his mama.

Admirable as it may have been to try and add some levity to what is otherwise a teen exploitation flick designed to capitalize on the current MMA craze, sometimes filmmakers and screenwriters need to take a good hard look at the material they're making and just try to make it as entertaining as possible without trying to score some film school Brownie points. It's the same sort of thing that utterly killed SUPERCROSS: THE MOVIE. Thankfully, there's enough KARATE KID rip-off goodness and laughably bad moments to counterbalance the occasional descents into CW Network dramatics.

Believe it or not, NEVER BACK DOWN was originally titled GET SOME. Someone must have figured out along the way that they weren't making a teen sex comedy or an outright porno.

So all in all, NEVER BACK DOWN has all the right stuff to join the ranks of the all-time schlocktacular KARATE KID rip-offs, but it doesn't quite achieve that plateau due to being too long and too burdened down by tiresome melodramatics. It's definitely watchable, sometimes even quite enjoyable, but the fast forward button will come in handy at times. When it came to the film's length and its overabundance of tepid melodramatic angst, those responsible for NEVER BACK DOWN should have backed down.

MY NAME IS SCOTT FOY AND I PAID TO SEE KICKBOXER