Southpaw

Southpaw (15)

USA 2015 124 mins Dir: Antoine Fuqua Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Forest Whitaker, Rachel McAdams, Oona Laurence, 50 Cent, Naomie Harris

To use a boxing analogy, Southpaw is comfortably a middleweight movie: neither hefty enough to land a knockout heavyweight blow nor wispy enough to collapse to the floor like a lightweight. Largely rising on the strength of its excellent cast, Antoine Fuqua’s predictable drama packs a punch – but you can see every right hook coming from 20 miles away.

The increasingly chameleonic and terrific Jake Gyllenhaal sheds the snake-like exterior of his creepy Nightcrawler character to assay beefy brawler Billy Hope. Built like a truck, Gyllenhaal’s physical commitment to the role is immediately apparent yet, as one would expect, he invests the character with emotional nuance too, rising far above a script that needs to work harder to support its talented star.

At the start of the movie Hope is at the top of his game, celebrated in the ring and beloved by his wife Maureen and daughter Leila outside of it. They are played by Rachel McAdams and Oona Laurence, the film initially promising a degree of psychologically complex domestic drama that it ultimately doesn’t follow through with. Maureen is concerned that with each bruising match, the already mumblesome Billy is becoming increasingly punch drunk, despite the fact that his success has brought them financial security and a lavish palatial mansion. Perhaps it’s time for him to bow out in style.

Having delivered a slurred speech at a charity event, Billy is openly challenged to a match by the emptily antagonistic Escobar (Miguel Gomez). The tension results in tragic consequences when Billy loses Maureen in a sudden and shocking shooting, an event that causes his life to go into freefall. Having lost his house, Billy also loses his daughter to the dark forces of protective services, causing him to become a sweaty, suicidal mess. Having gone to work at a gym owned by Forest Whitaker’s grizzled boxing trainer Tick Wills (is there any other kind?) Billy sees a chance at redemption: Tick will train and restore him to his former glory, allowing Billy to ultimately get his daughter back. And of course we know exactly who he is going to be fighting.

Utterly clichéd though the story is, there is a degree of enjoyable familiarity in watching the requisite elements of a boxing movie being played out. It’s like wearing a comfy pair of slippers in winter: just because you know what to expect doesn’t lessen the enjoyment. And only the most hard-hearted of people could resist the primal blood-sweat-saliva ding dongs that accompany Billy’s rise and fall. The camera has always loved the boxing ring, as the likes of Rocky and Raging Bull attest, and Fuqua’s efficiently framed direction captures the physicality of the fights in all their glory.

Yet there’s a nagging sense that this is a movie with more of an eye on brawn than brain. The trajectory of the storyline is so uninspired, the relentless emphasis on Gyllenhaal’s cheesy-gratery abs so insistent, that one often wishes for more subtlety and character insight to go with the punches. The presence of 50 Cent and a shockingly wasted Naomie Harris in vacant supporting roles raise suspicion that there was perhaps a more interesting, unpredictable movie in a previous edit.

It’s up to Gyllenhaal to land the strongest blows, one atypically quiet and moving scene with Whitaker acting as a moment of characterful insight as we get a vivid sense of the redemption Billy is seeking. However, the show is stolen by the terrific newcomer Laurence, whose emotional performance as daughter Leila rings true with raw emotion. The scenes with her and Gyllenhaal are the film’s most truthful. It’s just a shame that the movie couldn’t have thrown us a few more curveballs along the way.