At the center of a story, in a performance evoking intense idealism, is Mike Terry (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a martial-arts instructor who runs a storefront studio on a barren city street. His is not one of those glass-and-steel fitness emporiums, but a throwback to an earlier time; the sign on his window promises jiu-jitsu, and he apparently studied this art from those little pamphlets with crude illustrations that used to be advertised in the back pages of comic books. I studied booklets like this as a boy; apparently one embodies the philosophy of The Professor, a Brazilian martial-arts master who is like a god to Mike.

Mike has few customers, is kept afloat by the small garment business of his wife Sondra (Alice Braga), is seen instructing a Los Angeles cop named Joe Collins (Max Martini). When you seem to be your studio's only instructor, the impression is fly by night, but there's a purist quality to Mike's dedication that has Joe completely convinced, and they both seriously believe in the "honor" of the academy.

Now commences a series of events it would be useless to describe, and which are eventually almost impossible to understand, involving a troubled lawyer (Emily Mortimer), a movie star (Tim Allen), the star's shifty manager (Joe Mantegna) and the world of a pay-for-TV fight promoter (Ricky Jay). All of these characters seem like marked-down versions of the stereotypes they're based on, and the pay-for-view operation feels more like local access cable than a big bucks franchise.

In a bewildering series of deceptions, these people entrap the idealistic Mike into debt, betrayal, grief, guilt and cynical disappointments, all leading up to a big televised fight sequence at the end which makes no attempt to be plausible and is interesting (if you are a student of such things) for its visual fakery. We've seen a lot of crowd scenes in which camera angles attempt to create the illusion of thousands of people who aren't really there, but "Redbelt" seems to be offering a crowd of hundreds (or dozens) who aren't really there. At a key point, in a wildly impossible development, the action shifts out of the ring, and the lights and cameras are focused on a man-to-man showdown in a gangway. The conclusion plays like a low-rent parody of a "Rocky" victory. The last shot left me underwhelmed.

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