Went to see this one this past weekend, and i'd give it a solid "meh." Basically the movie is like The Fast and the Furious plus Fight Club. There's a lot of fighting with heavy emphasis on barely clothed girls, nice cars, and big houses.

Basically the plot is some kid moves from Iowa to Orlando, but before he moves he starts a huge brawl during one of his football games. He gets to orlando, and everyone knows about his fight via, what else, the internet. The "obviously spawn of satan" antagonist is big into fight clubbing, mainly because he's really really good at it. so iowa boy goes to a party at some house, and antagonist guy is there, he then tries to get iowa to fight with him, and when it doesnt work..he says something about iowa boy's dad (who died before the movie started due to drunk driving). of course he just doesnt say "something" he apparently knows every little detail about it. at this point in the movie i asked my wife "how is he supposed to know about that?" she said "the internet" and i said "oh."

so lets break from the plot here for a minute. because the kind of thing i just mentioned happened a LOT in this movie. like peopel just showing up at the main characters house. "how did they know where he lives?" internet apparently, because the movie sure as hell doesnt explain it. it's like "the internet" is a given in this movie, and that strikes me as extremely lazy storytelling.

anyway, back to plot, so the 2 kids fight, iowa-boy gets his ass handed to him, and decided to go train with some african mixed-martial arts champion in a pretty much "Rocky-esque" series of montages.

I guess thats as far as i'll go in the story line because i dont want to spoil anything else for anyone. but pretty much the plot isnt what you go to see the movie for, its fighting. the fight scenes are pretty well choreographed, i'll give them that. there was all kinds of fun punching and kicking and grappling etc. one turn off about the fighting was, at near the end of the movie, the main character takes a punch and it goes like, x-ray. all of a sudden you can see thru him to his ribs. i thought it was supposed to be some kind of Mortal Kombat type special power by his opponent, but apparently it was just to show that it was a really hard hit to the bones. I didnt actually see anything break with the x-ray vision-cam but maybe it did and was just hard to tell? i dont know, but the special effect was kind of off-putting since we'd been through a whole movie with just about no special effects, and there have been tons of fights and tons of hard hits with no xray vision. so why throw that in right at the end of the movie? it happened again in the "final fight" too, but seriously, a movie chock full of kids beating the crap out of each other and there's only 2 x-ray punches? doesnt really make sense to me.

and one more thing. i dont think the movie people knew how they wanted to show the main character. he was answering hard questions at school, being really nice to people around him, etc. but then he got home and was a total dick to his mom like, nonstop. The net effect was that he didnt really ever seem like a "good guy" until the end of the movie, but it wasnt like he had some sort of "transformation" either since he wasnt ever really "bad." so characterization there was pretty messed up.

anyway, thats my review of the movie. i really dont know what to think about it. i mean, the plot was boring and the characters unconvincing, but the action was pretty good..and it is an action movie after all. i guess i'd give it something like a 4 or 5 out of 10.