Review of Redbelt (2008) by Chads. — 09 May 2008

While we recognize the sophistication behind a motif when it's employed in a literary, or cinematic work; the primary motif for "Redbelt", a bowl of chance containing three stones(two white and one black), looks downright bizarre when Mike's intellectual property is actually being utilized at the start of a mixed-martial arts fight.

Under the stewardship of a fight promoter, the man who draws the black stone, doesn't lose with honor, he just loses. The drawing of the stones works on a literary level, but as a realistic depiction of a sporting event, a condition predicated on a handicap, prior to an actual fight, seems highly unlikely, if mixed-martial arts is the new boxing, and not the new "professional wrestling".

But the filmmaker needed to show Mike's "bushido" code being corrupted by dishonorable men to prompt this decent man into a transformation for his own good. In the film's climax, we can see that he's rewritten the bylaws without abandoning its basic tenets, as a means to show his wife(Alice Braga), his Hollywood connection(Tim Allen), and his new friend(Emily Mortimer), that he's going for the red belt(read: brass ring) on his own non-denominational terms.

"Redbelt" is a thinking man's "Rocky", but more relevantly, it's a breathing man's "Never Back Down". It's also "House of Games" meets "State and Main".