There are people who will be deterred by the trailer of A Warrior’s Heart.
If you watch below, you’ll see everything one might expect from a movie starring Kellan Lutz, Ashley Greene and Chord Overstreet: it’s the story of a boy just damaged enough to need saving, but just down-to-earth enough to be worth the effort. Conor Sullivan’s (Lutz) father dies overseas in Iraq, which thrusts the boy into a spiral of contentious behavior, including attacking classmates violently and destroying school property.
But there’s a glimmer of hope. Three glimmers, actually. There’s lacrosse: the one thing that makes sense to Conor. There’s Sgt. Major Duke Wayne (Adam Beach), the enigmatic Native American soldier who teaches him how to be the man his father might be proud of. And, most of all, there’s Brooklyn (Greene), the one girl worth this damaged boy’s heart.
So, yeah. It’s sappy. It’s angsty. It’s melodramatic. There’s a lot of locker-pounding and rain-crying. But let me ask you this… why is that a bad thing? Why is an amplification of human emotion in cinema necessarily deemed “silly”? Why can’t we be dealt a hyper-emotional story, with extraordinarily expressive characters? Maybe ones that don’t necessarily act exactly as your typical actual people above the age of thirteen do, but who, more importantly, represent struggles, challenges, emotions and pangs we are all quite familiar with?
I think we ought to consider that question, and give A Warrior’s Heart its fair chance. And why am I so passionate about this? Well, because Ethan Rom is in it. And that’s reason enough for me to back any movie.
