REVIEW: Never Surrender (2009)

Argentinean-born kickboxing champion, filmmaker and action star Hector Echavarria makes his directing debut in the U.S. in NEVER SURRENDER, the first in a series of MMA-inspired independent action movies produced by Echavarria’s Destiny Entertainment Productions, all to be targeted at the Latino community and given wide home video distribution by Lionsgate. The film is B-movie material all the way with a flimsy script, bad acting and limited art direction supplanted by heavy doses of chest-thumping machismo amid tightly-edited and exaggerated ring fighting, soft porn-style sex and nudity, and enough “bling” on display to fill a 50 Cent music video.

This film no doubt has a niche audience, not necessarily limited to any ethnic group, as it seems carefully engineered to attract viewers easily impressed by designer t-shirts with sequin skulls, lots of slow-motion copulation, stretch Humvees, and a plot involving an underground fighting circuit where knuckle-dragging he-men collect consorts for pounding their opponents’ faces into the mat. If you haven’t guess it yet, I’m not a part of that niche audience despite my love of action cinema and therefore see little value here even though I find production standards to be generally above average while veteran actor Patrick Kilpatrick delivers a solid performance as the lead villain.

Echavarria is Diego Carter, a champion MMA fighter lured into an illegal fighting circuit by a long-legged blonde beauty (Silvia Koys) who works for the bloodthirsty Seifer (Kilpatrick). No fighting rules and the fact that winners take consorts as prize doesn’t seem to bother Diego and he’s soon battling his way through the circuit where he takes on a variety of fighters including a capoeira specialist played by real-life capoeira performer Lateef Crowder (THE PROTECTOR).

Old friends worried by Diego’s recent disappearance track him down and try in vain to convince him to leave this shadowy underworld. Yet as the novelty of living in a mansion and sleeping with a different woman after each winning match wears off, Diego discovers that these consorts are basically sex slaves, prostitutes forced to keep the winning fighters happy. Diego suddenly grows a conscience and decides to fight his way out of this corrupt tournament world and take the ladies with him but he’ll have to fight his way through Seifer’s men before taking on the boss himself. Lucky for Diego, his old MMA buddies have got his back.

Echavarria has previous experience as a martial arts actor in CONFESSIONS OF A PIT FIGHTER, EXTREME FORCE and Argentinean film series EXTERMINEITORS. None of these would be classified as high-brow genre entertainment so it’s no surprise that he would stick to what he knows best for his own first feature film. Unfortunately, what he apparently knows isn’t all that impressive, either from a filmmaking standpoint or from a screen fighting perspective.

The film’s script is rough and underdeveloped with disjointed scene shifts and rudimentary character development, leaving Echavarria to fill the movie out with random montages set to generic power rock music, way too many unnecessary sex scenes for an “action” movie, and fight sequences with little or no build up.

I cannot comment on his real-world fighting ability but as a screen fighter, Echavarria appears mediocre at best here. He’s slow, lacking in grace and seems to have only limited understanding of how to play to the camera. A sure sign that he is underperforming, perhaps even to his own standards is the high prevalence of cuts during his moves. Sure, just about everybody abuses post editing in modern action filmmaking but I’m seeing too many editing gimmicks here, not unlike some of the worst Taiwanese kung fu movies of the 1970s that relied on spliced action and reaction shots to piece together a sequence that the performers were incapable of doing with any skill live. Filmmakers might argue that this is a way to add style to a sequence. I call it bad action filmmaking.

Like a true kickboxer, Echavarria is dishing out all kinds of high kicks, spinning kicks, flying scissor kicks, you name it. Some of these moves may actually be well executed but they’re poorly framed. I suggest Echavarria focus more on either filmmaking or acting. He hasn’t mastered either and trying to do both at the same time is not producing the best results.

There is a problem with Echavarria’s use of kicking in the ring, as if it were still 1988. What worked in BLOODSPORT doesn’t in the era of the UFC where grappling and ground work has proven to be superior to flashy leg work and audience expectations have changed. In the same way, capoeira is a joke when put into the ring with grapplers. Filmmakers need to decide what kind of movie they’re going to make. They cannot throw any mix of fighting styles together and expect their audience to accept it unless necessary steps are taken to adequately suspend disbelief, as in using a fantasy or comedic context. Notice that Donnie Yen used MMA correctly in FLASHPOINT by not mixing it with the exaggerated wire-fu he used in past films. In contrast, Tony Jaa went with a consistently stylized approach to make his exaggerated fights against a variety of martial arts disciplines in THE PROTECTOR acceptable within the context of the movie.

MMA and UFC fans may recognize some of the supporting cast filled out by the likes of Georges St. Pierre, B.J. Penn, Anderson Silva, and others. Many of these guys get a token fight in the film, nothing to speak of really. Again, real MMA fighting doesn’t translate well to film unless you understand screen fighting. They are two completely different skills. I get the impression these MMA stars are all basically playing themselves in cameo roles in Echavarria’s movie. None of them can act and their screen fighting abilities are limited. Interestingly, Lionsgate’s marketing for the movie almost completely ignores Hector Echavarria while suggesting that the film might feature an ensemble cast of MMA stars which isn’t really true but it has probably driven up sales and rentals among MMA fans, as intended. In short, this is really an MMA exploitation movie that is capitalizing on the popularity of the UFC but I doubt it will please fans of MMA or screen fighting.

NEVER SURRENDER is unintended, self-parody. It’s the epitome of the worst aspects of Hollywood action filmmaking of any budget that puts self-aggrandizement, gaudy style and material excess above substance, quality and genuine entertainment value. My suggestion to action filmmakers like Hector Echavarria, who obviously has the means to produce commercial-grade films, is to save the money spent on porn stars and stretch Hummers and put it towards a few more days of script polishing, acting courses and fight sequence planning. I cannot guarantee that it’ll make you more successful but it might help in garnering a small measure of respect among genre fans.

REVIEW: Never Surrender (2009), 3.7 out of 10 based on 18 ratings

by Mark Pollard

Related Topics:
Hector Echavarria  •  Kickboxing  •  Lionsgate  •  MMA  •  Never Surrender (2009)