I won't lie: I cringed when I saw the the new Antoine Fuqua-directed boxing drama SOUTHPAW had its lead character—a white boxer played by Jake Gyllenhaal—with the name of Billy Hope. Seriously? I'm assuming this was a selection made my the film's writer, "Sons of Anarchy" creator Kurt Sutter. The decision is so subtle, I'm shocked that Billy didn't have "Great White Me" tattooed on his back. As it turns out, this little boxing movie cliché is one of so many I lost count about halfway through, which doesn't mean the film is terrible; it's just familiar to a fault.
I tend to enjoy the heightened drama of Antoine Fuqua's works, including TRAINING DAY, THE EQUALIZER, and OLYMPUS HAS FALLEN, so the fact that SOUTHPAW indulges itself as far as over-expression isn't inherently an issue. Billy is the undisputed champion in his division of boxing (I think it's light heavyweight), and he's been at the game so long that's he's beginning to see the early effects of long-term brain damage—nothing too serious, but enough that his wife Maureen (Rachel McAdams) is pushing him to quit the game that has made them quite rich. Billy and Maureen grew up together as orphans, a fact that is repeated to us a few times, I believe to let us know that Maureen is no gold-digging boxer's wife; she's on his side and loves him for him. For importantly, she wants their young daughter Leila (Oona Laurence) to have a a viable father when she gets older.
But Billy's oldest friend and fight coordinator Jordan (recently bankrupt 50 Cent) is pushing him to sign a three-fight deal to wrap up his career with a massive payday, and Billy's inclined to agree to it, even though there are no real viable fighters left for him to beat. The one exception being rising contender Miguel Escobar (an appropriately thuggish Miguel Gómez), who shows up at Billy's post-fight press conferences, baiting him into "taking a punch from a real man."
I don't think I'm spoiling anything since this moment is in every trailer for SOUTHPAW (but just in case, if you don't want to know the film's big dramatic turn, stop reading), but the film makes a major shift early on, after a charity event attended by both Billy and Miguel. In the lobby of the hotel afterwards, a fight breaks out between the two boxers and shots ring out, leaving Maureen dead on the floor and Billy understandably crushed beyond words, a fact made all the worse by the fact that Maureen's final action was to try and stop the fight, and Billy's hair-trigger temper got the best of him.
At this point, it's probably worth talking about Gyllenhaal's spellbinding performance. And when I say "spellbinding," I only mean that you can't take your eyes off of whatever it is he's doing or trying to do. He plays Billy as a marble-mouthed raw nerve, a galoot who mumbles his way through every scene to the point where I felt like I needed a hearing aide. And those are in the scenes before Maureen's death. After she's gone, and he's forced to be a single dad who is too emotionally broken to think about her well being, let alone where his boxing career goes from here. It seems like in an instant, his money dries up, he pushes his friends away, and his anger is so front and center that he finds himself at Miguel's doorstep ready to commit murder (which doesn't happen or this would have been a much shorter film). Every action Billy makes seems aimed at self destruction, and as if on cue, child protection services is at his door removing his daughter.
Outside of Gyllenhaal's over-the-top acting work, SOUTHPAW suffers from McAdams' departure in more ways than one. She's by far the most interesting character in the film. We so often see the pretty boxer's wife or girlfriend in a tight dress and covered in bling, but we're led to believe that Maureen is different and that there's something interesting going on with her; McAdams sells that perfectly, and her leaving the film—while necessary for this particular story—is a loss for us as well as Billy.
Now living in squalor, Billy decides that the only thing that matters is getting his daughter back, needing a job and steady income to make that happen. He gets supervised visits with her, overseen by a compassionate social worker played by Naomie Harris, best known to American audiences as James Bond's new Miss Moneypenny. But even those moments don't bring either of them comfort as Leila resents her father for allowing things to get so bad that she ended up in this place. Looking for work, Billy goes where he knows best, a rundown gym operated by one-time great trainer Titus "Tick" Wills (Forest Whitaker), who lets Billy clean up after hours. Not at all surprising, being back around other fighters gives Billy the itch to start training again, and Tick begrudgingly agrees to help.
In case you've never seen a movie before, this is all leading to Billy whipping himself into fighting shape again and what is essentially a grudge match between Billy and Miguel, whom Billy blames for his wife's death and all the troubles that followed. The outcome isn't really the point, except it is in an Antoine Fuqua movie. The final boxing match is epic, bloody, sweaty, painful, and capture in physical terms Billy's emotional outpouring. The overall look of the film is so gritty and undersaturated that you'll feel the need for a good cleansing after watching it. For me, the film boils down to its portrayal of bombastic emotions. Gyllenhaal is in desperate need of being reeled in, just a touch, because the way he's playing Billy in this film is an absolute distraction from the pain we actually want to feel for him.
The real hidden gem in SOUTHPAW is Whitaker, who hasn't had a role this meaty in quite some time. He's more than just the stereotypical trainer; he's a fully realized character with strange, telling quirks that are executed to perfection. If you are on the fence about seeing this film, let Whitaker be the thing that tips you over the edge to check it out. But the rest of the film is a mixed bag of so much we've seen before. If you're curious to see how Gyllenhaal continues to change his body from the dangerously skinny man he played in Nightcrawler to the muscle mass he is in SOUTHPAW, that's a legit reason to see the film. But if you're looking for something, anything genuinely new, this is not the place.
