Its heart is very much in the right place - a place that movies all but ignore - but its mind is a mush.
Whether or not one thinks of this while observing the intense eroticism of the film and its gawking display of sweating, half-nude teenagers, knowing about it insinuates a queasy frisson to the themes of mentorship and initiation, with their appeal for trust and relinquishing control.īut there I go letting ego cloud my mind, when the seminal fact of “Peaceful Warrior” is that for all its manifest corniness, this is an achingly sincere and supremely unembarrassed effort to transform an audience for the good.
Mindlessly espousing principles of “no mind” and evidently capable of teleportation, this gravel-voiced fortune cookie suggests the missing link between Grizzly Adams and Yoda.īased on a best-selling book by Dan Millman, this rich slice of spiritualist cheese has been served up on screen by the director Victor Salva, best known to audiences for his “Jeepers Creepers” horror movies, and perhaps best known to authorities in California as a man who served time in prison in the 1980’s for molesting a 12-year-old boy who had appeared in his movies. A didactic enlightenment parable couched as a heroic sports flick, the film stars Scott Mechlowicz as Millman, an arrogant gymnast in Berkeley, Calif., who is learning New Age life lessons from a pseudo-Buddhist gas station guru played by Nick Nolte. This is one of the few movies out there that will inspire you to make changes in your life and. I was looking forward to the film, but with some trepidation, considering that prior attempts at communicating spiritually oriented books or ideas had fallen short of my expectations and had. 'Peaceful Warrior' is that rare film that manages to be hugely inspirational without being cheesy. Starting with the title and extending everywhere else, “Peaceful Warrior” is blatantly ludicrous. I was invited to a screening of The Peaceful Warrior in NYC Thursday April 13th, having just learned of this films existence a few days earlier.