Never Surrender
Year: 2009
Director: Hector Echavarria
Stars: Hector Echavarria, Patrick Kilpatrick, James Russo
MPAA Rating: R
Studio: Lionsgate Entertainment
Running Time: 88 Mins
Official Website: http://www.neversurrenderdvd.com/







“Never Surrender” devolves in the underworld of mixed marital arts. The film is about an MMA champion, who lured into the underworld of MMA, when a mysterious promoter offers him the opportunity of a lifetime with the women and the money that comes with winning each match. He soon begins to realize that everything is not what they seem to be, when he finds out the promoters illegal activities. Now it’s kill or be killed, as the fighter must fight for his life and stop this sadistic promotor from more harm to everyone involved. The film feature a collection of some of the world’s best mixed martial artists that includes George “Rush” St Pierre, Anderson “The Spider” Silva, “The Prodigy” B.J Penn, Quentin “Rampage” Jackson and “The Texas Crazy Horse” Heath Herring.

Movie Review

"Never Surrender" is one of those films that you would file as a guilty pleasure film. There was only one positive to this film, at least the fight sequences were filmed very well. The sequences made the fight scenes feel like it's an actually MMA fight, as the fights were choreographed well. Even though, it moved the pace fast, as I was entertained and actually interested. That's the only good thing, as everything else was pretty bad.

Hector Echavarria's direction wasn't very good, as this film felt like a ninety minute music video, than an all out action film with story and development. One of the reasons for that, everywhere I looked in this film; there was either hot women running around or loud heavy metal music playing in the background. It made the film feel like a best of UFC tape, than an action film. His direction also didn't focus on very getting the performances down to the point that makes a film respectable. The acting felt bland. That's normally makes films boring, but the fact that I’m a huge MMA fan and the atmosphere of the film sucked me in. It probably made me enjoy this film somewhat.

The screenplay was just as equally worse, as the direction, as this was a film that never cared about developing anything. David Storey's screenplay was repetitive. I really think he didn't put any thought into developing anything that would make the story entertaining. This film had an interesting plot line, but what he does is to make this story come off, as a collection of action sequences, so that the viewer doesn't need a story, he just needs fights and hot women. It was if the structure of the film wasn’t bad enough, it went like this, Fight Promo, Fight Title Card, Fight, Sex Scene, Development towards next fight. It went on like that, a couple of times during the course of the film. That's not how you create a story, that's how you create repetitiveness. That’s the main reason why the story, the characters and the main relationship weren’t developed.

Even with all that, I still kind of enjoyed this film, because at the end of the day the film was fun to watch. Don’t ask me how, because it’s just that.

DVD Review

The DVD extras starts off with a seventeen minute featurette “Behind the Scenes of Never Surrender”. It pretty much focuses much on footage that was shot during the making of this film. With the exception of a couple of quick interview, the documentary never gives you the inside look into the actors perspective to their characters, as there really wasn’t much information that I got out of it.

Next, on the disc is a fourteen minute featurette called “Anatomy of a Fight”. It’s pretty much the same thing as the documentary before, but the main problem with this was that it doesn’t focus on one fight; it focuses on all of them. That’s a problem, when expecting one fight to be broken down, and instead you get all the fights. If that featurette focused on one of them than this could have been an effective featurette, but it doesn’t it. It comes off, as another typical behind the scenes featurette.

Finally, this disc wraps up with a music video from 12 Stones, the film’s theatrical trailer and trailers for other Lionsgate releases.

If your looking for a guilty pleasure, than this is not a bad film, as I had fun with it from that perspective, but if you're looking development and entertaining story, than skip this one at all costs, as you'll be wanting to surrender.

Review Rating: 2 Stars
DVD Extras: 1 Star