Southpaw

After the first photos emerged from Southpaw, all everybody could talk about was Gyllenhaal's physical transformation for the role. But since the metamorphosis of actors seems to be the current zeitgeist of Hollywood, I was more interested in what director Antoine Fuqua could do with his dark cinematic style and a sports drama. The answer is: everything that's been done before, with Eminem slapped over the top.

Billy Hope (Jake Gyllenhaal) is an undefeated light heavyweight boxer with a wife Maureen (Rachel McAdams) and daughter Leila (Oona Laurence). Billy lives the high life, with his large mansion and blinged-up posse, but after sustaining an eye-injury during a match, Maureen convinces him that it's time to retire. After another boxer, Miguel Escobar (Miguel Gomez) taunts him, leading to a very public brawl, Maureen is accidentally hurt and dies at the scene. Heartbroken and depressed, Billy also loses his daughter to social services. The only way he can get his daughter back is to get his life back on track, which he starts doing by getting a job at a gym owned by ex-boxer Titus "Tick" Wills (Forest Whitaker). After Tick starts to train Billy, he strives once more to seek the redemption he needs.

This is basically an hour of watching Billy Hope's life fall apart, then an hour of him picking up the pieces, in the most unoriginal of ways. I have no doubt that Gyllenhaal gave this role his all, but his character is constantly reduced to polarising extremes of emotions - either depression or extreme anger - but never anything in-between. The blame very much lies with the plot, which, cliche after cliche, tells the same story of redemption that we've seen in boxing films more times than anybody would like to admit. The first act of Southpaw establishes the obnoxious characters, entrenched in a shallow, tedious world. The early development is so shockingly bad that I honestly couldn't care less about Hope's wife dying. From the banal script-writing to the emotion-milking dialogue, the film opens a wreck.

It's not until the second act, when Whitaker's character comes into the mix that Southpaw manages to conjure up some dignity. Whitaker similarly pours everything into Tick, and at times the potential of the character shines through, but he's eventually reduced to the typical enigmatic black motivational trainer movie trope. If it wasn't him, it was Morgan Freeman in Million Dollar Baby before him and so on. As for the other characters, McAdams's portrayal of a sidelined boxer's wife is as dreary as it is two-dimensional, and 50 Cent's character is just an outright arsehole. The biggest insult is the suggestion that we could empathise with almost any of these characters.

Boxing films are well known for their cinematic exuberance, and at times Mauro Fiore manages to capture the raw emotions of the moment, but Southpaw visually lacks the ingenuity that others like it have been brave enough to attempt, and ultimately the film is degraded to the archetypal training montages - complete with Eminem soundtrack - that we could all see coming from a mile off.  In the end, Fiore can't manage to stretch the style of Southpaw beyond what we've seen before. 

Of all the great boxing films - Million Dollar Baby, Raging Bull etc. - the triumphant ones create an atmosphere and tell an original story. Whilst the two leads manage to conjure up surprisingly decent performances given the material, Southpaw is ultimately the antithesis of original, and risks fading into mediocrity.