Warrior is a great sports movie. One of the best, and there have been a few. What it has above all else is a keen sense of family. While Rocky charted the rise, fall, montage and rise of its singular hero, Warrior tries instead to understand two strangers who were once as brothers should be.

To consider them, any relation would seem an unlikely prospect. Tommy (Tom Hardy) is a broad-shouldered boxer, contemptuous of an alcoholic father. Brendan (Joel Edgerton), a high school physics teacher. With a gym bag slung low around his waist, Tommy returns home with a whiskey peace offering, knowing all too well it will be refused. “I think I liked you better when you were drunk”, he snarls, before slumping into a chair and helping himself. Across town, his estranged family celebrates a young daughter’s birthday, having safely hidden a foreclosure letter beneath a dozen more. Theirs is a familiar horror of medical bills and refinancing, in a world apart from the middle class dream of bootstrap success. Brendan is the proud family man who lies to his wife about where he goes at night. She waits up, only he doesn’t have much of an explanation for why a bouncer would be coming home every night with bloodied fists and thick bundles of cash.

For their own reasons, the two brothers are drawn to a prestigious winner-takes-all tournament in Las Vegas. They meet one night on the beach, finding scant reconciliation amongst bitterness and regret. They circle one another in the sand, replaying the memory of Tommy and his mother haved fleed the family home, only for Brendan to stay behind with the sweetheart he would later marry. For his crimes, he faces the cold reminder of his mother having died without her first born. Even in shared grief, Tommy gives forth a rage so consuming you’d believe its tremors could roll back the tides.

I’m led to believe the sport of mixed martial-arts has a record no worse than any other, and yet to watch it is to observe a Darwinian brawl of unsparing brutality. The siblings are not obviously matched. Towering thumpers loom over the unassuming teacher from Pittsburgh, while Tommy pummels challenger after challenge until they sprawl helplessly to the canvass. A seething ball, he comes and goes without word or ceremony, not once waiting for the bell to ring. When you’re the only one left standing, to do otherwise would seem redundant.

Could a tournament such as this conclude with anything but a fight between sworn enemies? Perhaps not. Far more important than the framework are the themes you use to fill it, and writer-director Gavin O’Connor favours the bravest of all: heart. Rocky had it too, which is why we cared about the lumbering Italian in the first place. It’s why in ten years we’ll be talking about Warrior rather than Play It To The Bone, except as an exercise in sporting conflict captured with neither passion nor soul.

What counts isn’t whether two brothers make it to the final, but whether we care about them doing so. That’s what sports movies are about, and what Warrior succeeds at above all else. It’s an overwrought genre picture; a veritable chick flick for the guys. There are no points won for subtlety. Instead we have the novelty of two equally compelling fighters. Rocky fought everyone, but he fought them alone. No one cared about his two-tone punching bags, but the Conlon brothers we get. Both give us reasons to care, and still they have us choose.

It is the rare film, so transparent in its structure, that still has us doubt the outcome. Warrior has that quality and many others, among them a rare understanding of perseverance and redemption. When the end comes, as surely it must, it does so with a sound that just might break your heart.