Movie Review: 'Southpaw'
By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) --- The Southpaw trajectory -- rags to riches to rags to riches – certainly has a familiar ring to it.
The boxing ring.
But a movie can be formulaic as long as the formula is effectively applied. And the generic Southpaw is up to the task. It's a raw, intense boxing melodrama about redemption that's as straightforward as the central character's name – Billy Hope.
Jake Gyllenhaal stars as the great white Hope, an angry, undefeated light-heavyweight boxer married to Maureen, played by Rachel McAdams, who grew up with him in orphanages in Hell's Kitchen, emerged with him from their hardscrabble childhood, and now handles his career in the ring, along with Billy's official manager, played by Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson.
As the film opens, Billy wins and ascends to the championship in a Madison Square Garden match. But on the heels of this latest win, during which she watches him nearly lose an eye, Maureen understandably wants him – at age 41 -- to quit.
They live a luxurious and extravagant lifestyle in a mansion with their eleven-year-old daughter, Leila, played by Oona Laurence.
So he's the champ for a short spell, but then a personal tragedy turns his life upside down and he's got to fight his way back to the top to keep custody of his beloved daughter.
Forest Whitaker plays Tick Wills, who now manages a rundown gym and teaches non-professionals how to box, and whom Billy, homeless and broke, persuades to join him in his quest for a comeback that will take him to Las Vegas for a high-stakes title fight.
Director Antoine Fuqua (Training Day, Shooter, Olympus Has Fallen, The Equalizer), who spent some time as a boxer himself, simply follows the just-what-you'd-expect trajectory of Kurt Sutter's script, originally intended as a vehicle for Eminem.
But the dynamically-edited boxing sequences have an amazing authenticity, an intense realism that spills over and elevates the credibility of many of the other scenes as well.
Gyllenhaal, overlooked but Oscar nomination-worthy as a Best Actor for last year's Nightcrawler, has been doing strong work for years and is splendid here once again, transforming himself to the point that we barely recognize the actor who has excelled in such films as Donnie Darko, Brokeback Mountain, Love & Other Drugs, Zodiac, and Prisoners.
And McAdams makes the most of her screen time, creating such a vivid impression that she stays in our memory even when she's off-screen, just as she does for Billy.
What Southpaw lacks in originality and complexity, it makes up for in craftsmanship and ferociousness. So we'll land an uppercut on 3 stars out of 4 for a taut pugilistic drama. Southpaw packs a punch.