When you first pick up a copy of Death Warrior, which the crew out at Lions Gate sent me a copy of, you take notice of the fact that it’s written by Hector Echavarria, one of the stars of the film and a major name in Mixed Martial Arts circles.

Then, as you watch the film, you realize how spectacularly appropriate it is that this drivel was written by a guy who’s taken a whole lot of physical punishment.

Why am I hating on this movie, you ask?  Simple–here’s a plot synopsis: an MMA world champion is forced into the world of underground cage fighting, where he must kill his way through several OTHER MMA names in order to save his wife from getting killed by a tiny implant full of neurotoxin.  Oh, and the other MMA names also had THEIR families kidnapped.

Yes, it’s ninety minutes of Hector Echavarria and company having several cage fights broken up occasionally by the ultimately futile attempts to stop the NEXT match from going on.

For a guy that’s being portrayed as a hero–and of course, the movie portrays pretty much all the MMA fighters as paragons of virtue–he, along with his cohorts, really doesn’t seem to have a problem with snapping necks and breaking spines.  In fact, watching these guys coolly kill people who were, apparently, their close friends with the window dressing that they’re trying to save their families’ lives, is so incongruous as to be ludicrous.

Apparently, either Echavarria’s script  calls for the actors to have about as much problem murdering their close friends as they would taking out the garbage, or MMA figures are such abysmal actors that they don’t know that most people who kill their best friends would react with a bit more than a resigned sigh.

I don’t know which it is, but if someone doesn’t get Quintin “Rampage” Jackson into an acting class post-haste I REALLY fear for the A-Team remake.

The worst part is, I hear this is only the beginning of Echavarria’s writing career, which means there will be several more from him.  Hopefully they will get better.  I hold out little hope this will happen.

The Screenhead Ten Scale adamantly refuses to spit on this movie if it found it on fire, and hands it a one out of ten accordingly.  Craptacular does not begin to describe this clunky, self-aggrandizing beat-em-up with less plot than a WWE match and less connection to reality than the federal budget.