Watching your dad drunk-drive himself to death can be such a bummer. But not if it supplies you with enough rage to fight your way to the top of the high-school food chain!

“Never Back Down” combines teen-style “Fight Club” with the dance competition film, a style of cinema that just keeps coming off the assembly line. The film combats its generic cast and plotline with heaps of violence, chiseled abs, and Djimon Hounsou.

Fetishizing blood sport to the point of pornography, the characters exist in a world where high-school coeds would rather watch people get the pulp kicked out of them than get wasted on the weekends. Somehow, this is not an improvement. Packed with toned bodies, mindless bimbos, and jumpy martial arts flunkies, “Never Back Down” seems intent on making the case for a return to the kind of public brutality that the pesky nuisance called civilization keeps trying to stamp out.

Hot young Jake Tyler (Sean Faris) moves to this strange town after his brother (Wyatt Smith) wins a tennis scholarship to a camp in Orlando. Nursing a chip on his shoulder ever since his father drunkenly wrapped the car around a telephone pole one night, Jake is quickly enamored with a hot young blonde named Baja (Amber Heard). It’s easy to distinguish her from all the other overly tanned blondes in the film — she can walk in slo-mo. Unfortunately, Baja is dating Ryan McCarthy (Cam Gigandet), the school’s resident psycho, who wants to test Jake’s intense ability to pulverize people who talk smack about his boozing daddy. After a humiliating fight instigated by Baja, Jake plots his revenge, joining a gym run by Jean Roqua (Mr. Hounsou). There, he learns the skills that will allow him to destroy any human in mortal combat, and the restraint to refrain from ever doing so.

Unless someone honks at him, looks at him askance, or beats up his twitchy friend. Despite all of the Buddhist restraint that he learns from Jean Roqua, Jake has something to teach his Senegalese sensei as well. It’s hard to distinguish what exactly that is, but it probably has something to do with never using something and losing it. In “Never Back Down,” fighting is not the answer. Except when it is.