If you see one movie this year about a bunch of sweaty guys pounding each other real hard, make it “Warrior.” Admittedly, I don’t see many sports movies, but this mixed martial arts (MMA) sports drama is the best one I’ve seen since “Cinderella Man” back in 2005. It‘s definitely one of the year’s best.

Tom Hardy (Bane in the upcoming “The Dark Knight Rises”) plays Tommy, a former wrestler and Iraq war hero. Joel Edgerton (Tom Buchanan in the upcoming “The Great Gatsby”) plays his estranged brother Brendan, a fighter-turned-Physics teacher that needs to come up with money to save his family from foreclosure as well as his daughter and her bum heart.

Nick Nolte plays their father, a recovering alcoholic. When Tommy returns from Iraq, his father trains him for the MMA tournament, Sparta. Meanwhile, Joel is also training to get back in the ring and earn the money he needs to clear up his financial messes.

Of course, the two brothers end up facing each other in the ring. It’s a tad farfetched that both estranged brothers train and climb the MMA stardom ladder at the same time, but I didn’t even notice that quam until after the movie ended. The film is too involving to let your mind nitpick it.

“Warrior” is coming out when “The Fighter” is still fresh in everyone’s minds. “Warrior” is a much better movie than “The Fighter,” which was still good, but it’s strongest asset was its supporting cast of Melissa Leo and Christian Bale. The story was nowhere near as exciting or fun as “Warrior.” Also, the fight scenes in “The Fighter” were filmed in some kind of glossy high-definition that gave me a headache.

“Warrior” has a cast that, on paper, is not as impressive as the cast of “The Fighter.” But Tom Hardy and Joel Edgerton are very good. “Warrior” is doing disappointing business at the box office, but I think it will still help their blossoming careers.

I was most impressed with Hardy’s character. In the ring, he’s a total badass: brutal, relentless and imposing. But outside of the ring, he shows that he’s hurt and is hiding something. After his father (Nolte, also fantastic) finally breaks his thousand day streak of sobriety in response to an argument with Hardy in a casino, they share a touching moment of reconciliation.

But let’s say you don’t care about any of the performances or the story. Let’s say you want to go see “Warrior” for no other reason than to see guys beat the tar out of each other. The fight scenes are very well done. I don’t claim to know the rules of MMA, but based on the film, I assume you can’t hit your opponent in the family jewels nor after the bell sounds.

But even the uninitiated like me knows a good MMA fight when I see one. Those scenes are edited coherently yet are still brutal and sometimes intense. A total disregard for your fellow man rarely looks this exquisite.

Of course, “Warrior” ends with the two brothers pitted against each other in the end. But what’s interesting about this film’s final match-up is that we know what’s at stake for both of the opponents. The first half of the movie tells Tommy and Brendan’s stories parallel to each other before finally intersecting them at Sparta. We know both of the opponents back stories and are aware of what they have to lose.

In most movies of this genre, we only get the protagonist’s point of view and the opponent(s) are vilified and reduced to pieces of meat to punch. Think of all the people that had their asses handed to them by Rocky in his films and Mickey Ward in “The Fighter.” They were reduced to punching bags because the movie told us who to root for. Who’s to say the opponent didn’t have just as much, if not more, at stake than the person those movies told us to root for?

If the film only showed Tommy’s story, we might have never known that Brendan’s daughter was ill. Had the film only showed Brendan’s story, we might have never known he risked his life for a fellow soldier in Iraq. Those key plot points change the entire movie.

“Warrior” is a movie that understands this and uses it to its advantages. It doesn’t matter if Tommy or Brendan wins the fight, they still are going to lose something, and we know it. The result of the fight is very unpredictable. I appreciated that.

I have a weakness for movies like “Warrior.” Essentially, they’re just crowd-pleasers that celebrate being an underdog. Well, except for maybe “The Wrestler.” I’d hate to meet the crowd that found that movie pleasing.

I judge a movie like this in the context of how successful it is at differentiating itself from the rest of the herd. “Warrior” is very, very successful at doing that. I was reminded of how a younger me often thought about one day sparring in a boxing ring.

The only thing I would have contributed to boxing is making a fashion statement out of cauliflower ear.