In the words of Barbara Kruger of 1981, “You contrive elaborate rituals which permit you to caress the body of other males”. In the most extraordinary and intolerable ways possible, A Warrior’s Heart, meticulously performs those “elaborate rituals” through its brutish protagonist Conor, the short-tempered American high school student, and Kellan Lutz, the hot-blooded actor who attempts to reenact his father’s turbulent military masculinity on the lacrosse field.
Unannounced, the father (Chris Potter) returns from war and decides to take the family on a trip from California to the East Coast. This is because Conor is going to start why same private school on the East Coast that he attended when he was young. The other students in the school are not excited by the new alpha male challenge that they will have to deal with, but it does not look like there is any reason to worry. There is some good news though as he makes a good impression on the coach and is enrolled in the school’s lacrosse team. This means he gets to run around with a large, phallic-shaped controller and use it to smash everything while screaming and yelling, Boys will be boys, right? At least that’s what you would think looking at the other children. Conor is filled with (non)emotions and gets angry very easily, which leads him to shatter the school trophy cases and anger people. It places him in a Native American “boot camp” style situation, where he is taught by real male warriors to be a man without feelings.
The developments of this painfully clichéd film are so contrived, that it is as though a father and son’s relationship is caused by a tragic flaw – a complete inability for the father to question his model of masculinity. At one point, the father gives the son a long lacrosse stick as a gift, accompanied by a “joke” that it’s a bouquet of roses. Conor’s filial piety is put in check, as he is not permitted to conceal his anger, something society deems shameful. Instead, anger is viewed as a flaw, an aberration that needs correction via some sort of strenuous physical work.
A Warrior’s Heart is not only a blatant display of sexism through a rigid expectation of heterosexual masculinity, but it also represents females as mere decorative pieces in the realm of white men. For example, mothers in the film tell their sons to ‘stand up and be a man’ and wishful thinking skinny cheerleaders are presented who we never actually see cheer. The narrator, who happens to have a crush on Connor, chimes in and out of the film to say cliches such as ‘every warrior must know the heart that beats within them.’ Moreover, the film drowns in gimmicky pop songs that are in itself a reminder of how the characters are expected to feel. At times, A Warrior’s Heart goes so far as to delegate every creative aspect to the soundtrack and turns it into a music video that is plain offensive.
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