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Southpaw:
If there's one thing you can say about Southpaw, it's better than its trailer. When people think of how much modern movie trailers suck because they give away the entire plot, they are thinking about Southpaw. Basically every plot point in the first two acts is revealed. Billy Hope is an ex boxing champion who is down on his luck after an unfortunate ring incident and an unfortunate home life incident. He loses custody of his daughter and all of his possessions. He meets an old trainer, who he initially rejects for being out of touch but learns a special move from. He gets deus-ex-machina'd into the ring and is losing early but the move gets him back to a virtual tie. Of course, all of this information was already spoiled by virtue of being a boxing movie. I don't hate boxing movies, but I think we have to acknowledge as a society that they're the most formulaic type of sports movies, possibly second to the "true story" movies about a coach of one race uniting a town of another race through a high school team. Over time we traded out the young amateur underdog for the former champ underdog, but that doesn't actually change the character much. This is a well executed boxing movie, but it's hard to ignore just how little originality is present.
The first thing that everybody wants to talk about is Jake Gyllenhaal. Honestly, I was more impressed by his daughter, played by Oona Laurence. I expect Gyllenhaal to give us a fantastic performance, and this wasn't a Nightcrawler level performance, so I was happily satisfied by him. But Laurence blew me away. She's never been in anything I've heard of, and to see a child actress like that come into a Weinstein movie and go toe to toe with Gyllenhaal is exceptional. She has a full range of emotions, and the movie doesn't work without her. If she doesn't deliver, Gyllenhaal has nobody to connect to. Not to knock Forrest Whitaker, because I respect him as an actor, but he sleepwalked through his role in this. Gyllenhaal might be sympathetic because bad things happen to him, but his daughter is the only likable character in the movie. Of course that doesn't mean Gyllenhaal wasn't fantastic as a ripped boxer that was somehow dumber than his daughter. It's unfair how easily he can physically transform himself. He dropped 20 pounds to play Lou Bloom and added that back plus 20 more to play Billy Hope. He nails the thick mumble voice and the exhausted feelings of a man who just spent 11 rounds getting beat up. I think an Oscar campaign is a waste of money, because this will be a tough year for best actor and the movie around the performance isn't awards worthy, but the Weinsteins will try any campaign once. I was also pleasantly surprised by 50 Cent. For the uninformed, Southpaw was originally an Aftermath posse movie, with Eminem tagged as the lead boxer. Em decided to back off and wisely give the part to a real actor, but I was worried that 50 was going to either heavily overact or play himself. He does neither and gives a decent performance, which still would have been better if it was given to a real actor, but I never felt that he was distracting. Rachel McAdams was good enough to make me wish she was in it more, so that should count for something.
These good to great actors are given a weak script, and not just in its overuse of common tropes. I think they went too far in making Gyllenhaal's character suffer. Usually it's one or two things that cause the champ's life to spiral out of control, but he gets caught up in multiple murders, an arrest, losing his boxing license, and losing his daughter to child services. The second death especially felt unneeded. There's a character that gets introduced and his only personality is being the kind and innocent one, and the audience only hears secondhand that he died offscreen. There wasn't much of a point to it, that character didn't do much and it doesn't cause a change in the plot, but it's there because killing people makes you sad. It also felt like there were a few scenes missing between Hope and his daughter. Her feelings about him rotate between love and hate without any explanation as to why she feels this way. When she leaves her father, she's sad and wants to see him. When he goes to visit her for the first time a couple of days later, he wants nothing to do with her. A few scenes later, she wants to visit him again, and turns to hating him in the middle. I couldn't figure out the motivations for any of this beyond because the plot says so, which is a terrible reason for a character to do anything. I was also confused how Hope lost his fortune so fast. I'm not a boxing expert, but a 43-0 champion fighter with a 10 million dollar per fight contract awaiting him must have made at least a couple million per fight prior to that. A man with a net worth of at least 80 million dollars with 2 cars should not be paying a mortgage, and a 1 million dollar fine and a few months of property taxes should not break him. He has to serve a suspension from boxing for a little less than a year, which they say is a big problem because it's a year without income, even though a boxer will only fight twice a year under normal circumstances. Once again, the only justification that I can come up with is that we don't have a plot unless these unrealistic events happen. This is the first script from Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter, and I don't think it justifies getting a second chance. He's good at television and should probably stick to it.
If not Gyllenhaal, the movie was hyped as the boxing movies with realistic boxing scenes. This is absolutely accurate and is what pushed this okay movie into positive territory for me. The makeup department had a field day with the puddles of fake blood flowing everywhere. There are multiple rounds shot in real time, which allegedly were shot with one continuous take, but there are still cuts so I'm not sure how much truth there is to that claim. Between rounds we get an extreme closeup of Gyllenhaal's battered face and usually swollen and bloodied left eye, with his trainer and medical team frantically trying to help him out. Every single punch looked like it hit its mark and hurt badly. They're shot so well, it's like a combination of being there and watching an HBO stream of a fight. The camera angles switch frequently, and it never bothered me the way it sometimes does during a real fight and especially in movies. The last 20 minutes of this movie feel like a more exciting version of Pacquio-Mayweather. I also loved the final shot of the movie, set up to be from the point of view of a media cameraman. You see Gyllenhaal after the fight, and then his security team pushes you back into a hallway to let him have his moment alone.
Unfortunately, Southpaw may be the final film score ever designed by legendary composer James Horner, who died in a plane crash. There are a couple of movies that might end up using a Horner score, but right now this is the most recent film to use an unaltered work by Horner. Fans of him will probably be disappointed. The score isn't bad, even if it's not especially good. The problem is that Eminem refused to back off of the soundtrack like he did the acting role. This is just an opinion, but I thought every single song that he did was obnoxious. Horner doesn't get a chance to do very much because all of the big scenes are either in a boxing ring, where no score is used in order to keep the sound effects realistic, or at a gym, where Eminem smears his shouty choruses over training montages.
I honestly don't know how much this will be liked by boxing fans. Some might appreciate how accurate it is to the sport, others might decide that there's no point in watching an hour and a half of melodrama to get to a fight of similar quality to ones they watch often. Southpaw is a summer popcorn movie dressed up as something more important. It's fun and sweet and a fine way to spend some time and 10 dollars, but the story is ridiculous and the character's don't get developed beyond standard sports drama arcs. How much you can tolerate that will determine how much you like it, so I can't recommend it to people uninterested, but it's good at being what it is.
Southpaw:
If there's one thing you can say about Southpaw, it's better than its trailer. When people think of how much modern movie trailers suck because they give away the entire plot, they are thinking about Southpaw. Basically every plot point in the first two acts is revealed. Billy Hope is an ex boxing champion who is down on his luck after an unfortunate ring incident and an unfortunate home life incident. He loses custody of his daughter and all of his possessions. He meets an old trainer, who he initially rejects for being out of touch but learns a special move from. He gets deus-ex-machina'd into the ring and is losing early but the move gets him back to a virtual tie. Of course, all of this information was already spoiled by virtue of being a boxing movie. I don't hate boxing movies, but I think we have to acknowledge as a society that they're the most formulaic type of sports movies, possibly second to the "true story" movies about a coach of one race uniting a town of another race through a high school team. Over time we traded out the young amateur underdog for the former champ underdog, but that doesn't actually change the character much. This is a well executed boxing movie, but it's hard to ignore just how little originality is present.
The first thing that everybody wants to talk about is Jake Gyllenhaal. Honestly, I was more impressed by his daughter, played by Oona Laurence. I expect Gyllenhaal to give us a fantastic performance, and this wasn't a Nightcrawler level performance, so I was happily satisfied by him. But Laurence blew me away. She's never been in anything I've heard of, and to see a child actress like that come into a Weinstein movie and go toe to toe with Gyllenhaal is exceptional. She has a full range of emotions, and the movie doesn't work without her. If she doesn't deliver, Gyllenhaal has nobody to connect to. Not to knock Forrest Whitaker, because I respect him as an actor, but he sleepwalked through his role in this. Gyllenhaal might be sympathetic because bad things happen to him, but his daughter is the only likable character in the movie. Of course that doesn't mean Gyllenhaal wasn't fantastic as a ripped boxer that was somehow dumber than his daughter. It's unfair how easily he can physically transform himself. He dropped 20 pounds to play Lou Bloom and added that back plus 20 more to play Billy Hope. He nails the thick mumble voice and the exhausted feelings of a man who just spent 11 rounds getting beat up. I think an Oscar campaign is a waste of money, because this will be a tough year for best actor and the movie around the performance isn't awards worthy, but the Weinsteins will try any campaign once. I was also pleasantly surprised by 50 Cent. For the uninformed, Southpaw was originally an Aftermath posse movie, with Eminem tagged as the lead boxer. Em decided to back off and wisely give the part to a real actor, but I was worried that 50 was going to either heavily overact or play himself. He does neither and gives a decent performance, which still would have been better if it was given to a real actor, but I never felt that he was distracting. Rachel McAdams was good enough to make me wish she was in it more, so that should count for something.
These good to great actors are given a weak script, and not just in its overuse of common tropes. I think they went too far in making Gyllenhaal's character suffer. Usually it's one or two things that cause the champ's life to spiral out of control, but he gets caught up in multiple murders, an arrest, losing his boxing license, and losing his daughter to child services. The second death especially felt unneeded. There's a character that gets introduced and his only personality is being the kind and innocent one, and the audience only hears secondhand that he died offscreen. There wasn't much of a point to it, that character didn't do much and it doesn't cause a change in the plot, but it's there because killing people makes you sad. It also felt like there were a few scenes missing between Hope and his daughter. Her feelings about him rotate between love and hate without any explanation as to why she feels this way. When she leaves her father, she's sad and wants to see him. When he goes to visit her for the first time a couple of days later, he wants nothing to do with her. A few scenes later, she wants to visit him again, and turns to hating him in the middle. I couldn't figure out the motivations for any of this beyond because the plot says so, which is a terrible reason for a character to do anything. I was also confused how Hope lost his fortune so fast. I'm not a boxing expert, but a 43-0 champion fighter with a 10 million dollar per fight contract awaiting him must have made at least a couple million per fight prior to that. A man with a net worth of at least 80 million dollars with 2 cars should not be paying a mortgage, and a 1 million dollar fine and a few months of property taxes should not break him. He has to serve a suspension from boxing for a little less than a year, which they say is a big problem because it's a year without income, even though a boxer will only fight twice a year under normal circumstances. Once again, the only justification that I can come up with is that we don't have a plot unless these unrealistic events happen. This is the first script from Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter, and I don't think it justifies getting a second chance. He's good at television and should probably stick to it.
If not Gyllenhaal, the movie was hyped as the boxing movies with realistic boxing scenes. This is absolutely accurate and is what pushed this okay movie into positive territory for me. The makeup department had a field day with the puddles of fake blood flowing everywhere. There are multiple rounds shot in real time, which allegedly were shot with one continuous take, but there are still cuts so I'm not sure how much truth there is to that claim. Between rounds we get an extreme closeup of Gyllenhaal's battered face and usually swollen and bloodied left eye, with his trainer and medical team frantically trying to help him out. Every single punch looked like it hit its mark and hurt badly. They're shot so well, it's like a combination of being there and watching an HBO stream of a fight. The camera angles switch frequently, and it never bothered me the way it sometimes does during a real fight and especially in movies. The last 20 minutes of this movie feel like a more exciting version of Pacquio-Mayweather. I also loved the final shot of the movie, set up to be from the point of view of a media cameraman. You see Gyllenhaal after the fight, and then his security team pushes you back into a hallway to let him have his moment alone.
Unfortunately, Southpaw may be the final film score ever designed by legendary composer James Horner, who died in a plane crash. There are a couple of movies that might end up using a Horner score, but right now this is the most recent film to use an unaltered work by Horner. Fans of him will probably be disappointed. The score isn't bad, even if it's not especially good. The problem is that Eminem refused to back off of the soundtrack like he did the acting role. This is just an opinion, but I thought every single song that he did was obnoxious. Horner doesn't get a chance to do very much because all of the big scenes are either in a boxing ring, where no score is used in order to keep the sound effects realistic, or at a gym, where Eminem smears his shouty choruses over training montages.
I honestly don't know how much this will be liked by boxing fans. Some might appreciate how accurate it is to the sport, others might decide that there's no point in watching an hour and a half of melodrama to get to a fight of similar quality to ones they watch often. Southpaw is a summer popcorn movie dressed up as something more important. It's fun and sweet and a fine way to spend some time and 10 dollars, but the story is ridiculous and the character's don't get developed beyond standard sports drama arcs. How much you can tolerate that will determine how much you like it, so I can't recommend it to people uninterested, but it's good at being what it is.