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Friday, July 24, 2015

MOVIE REVIEW Southpaw
 The Roar And "Relegation" Of The Great White Hope

Jake Gyllenhaal as Billy "The Great" Hope in Antoine Fuqua's boxing drama "Southpaw".  The Weinstein Company
       
by Omar P.L. Moore/PopcornReel.com        Follow popcornreel on Twitter FOLLOW                                           
Friday, July 24, 2015

 “Don’t get hurt too bad,” advises Maureen (Rachel McAdams), or “Mo”, as her husband and light heavyweight boxing champ Billy "The Great" Hope (Jake Gyllenhaal) calls her.  Billy is the recipient of Mo’s wise words but he doesn’t take heed of them.  Welcome to the routine but occasionally enjoyable drama “Southpaw”, as directed by Antoine Fuqua, who mixes violence with a daughter-father story and redemption set against a bureaucratic system after tragedy strikes.

Billy is the film's great white hope in the squared circle, and a mocking newspaper headline in one scene reads, “The Great White Dope”.  Billy is his own battered drug.  The ring is the thing, and like most boxers Billy doesn't know how to quit it.  Think: Brokeback Boxer.  “Southpaw” exalts his ferocity and is seduced by his slow-motion snarl.  Mr. Gyllenhaal gives Billy a sorrowed monotone drawl and a feral, caged-animal demeanor in the ring.  But decision-making is Billy’s Kryptonite.  He’s never made a decision in his life, and flounders further after life hits him harder than any knockout punch.  Billy’s daughter Leila (Oona Laurence) pushes him to be a man, as does a rival boxer who torments him. 

Set in New York City, “Southpaw” is best when it chronicles systems — systems that trap and frustrate the working class.  Billy is stifled by his promoter Justin Maines (Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson), who threatens to bear shark teeth with every smile; family is disrupted by Public Services.  Billy is a casualty of a lack of education, but his left-hand hook and brawn has kept him afloat in America.  Like the country itself, Billy knows violence and has lived and died by it.  Broke, Billy blanches at having to clean up a gym.  He’d rather wipe the floor with the blood of an opponent. 

The film’s score, one of James Horner’s last, sits coolly and calmly, gracing the rough contours of this dank and sometimes in-your-face film — its boxing sequences are too dazzlingly fast at times to register.  Mr. Horner is given a brief and polite salute in the end credits.

What kept me interested in “Southpaw” was its banter between Mr. Gyllenhaal, who strips away his customary smarts and buries them deep in a hunk of shredded torso, and the always wily and charismatic Forest Whitaker as former boxer now-trainer Tick Willis, a gym-owner who says he doesn’t train professional fighters.  The two actors’ chemistry pops on screen.  “Southpaw” is engaging when its two working stiffs co-exist as has-beens, robbed and denied of the greatness they once tasted.  When tragedy strikes the mentoring Tick, a tragedy “Southpaw” pays scant attention to, he goes into overdrive. 

Mr. Gyllenhaal effectively captures the physical language of all the characters he plays ("Nightcrawler", et al.), and even with not-so-great scripts like Kurt Sutter’s here, makes the most of the material.  He’s always arresting to watch, and Mr. Fuqua’s direction elucidates the intensity and visceral aplomb he’s made his cinematic stomping ground.  Sometimes the director’s approach works (“The Equalizer” and “Training Day”.)  Other times (“Olympus Has Fallen”) it doesn’t.  As a drama “Southpaw” lacks consistency but there are genuinely rousing moments in the ring.  Otherwise "Southpaw" is an ideal matinee watch, or a Netflix visit.

The working class are tools for the system in “Southpaw” and their dreams are appropriated by failures and frauds.  Only the film’s women can save them from complete self-destruction.  It’s interesting that real life has left Mr. Jackson, as the film’s high-profile money-maker, a bankrupted star.  On dual planes overnight success when left unchecked becomes overnight failure — essentially the message that “Southpaw” leaves you with.

Also with: Naomie Harris, Victor Ortiz, Rita Ora.

“Southpaw” is rated R by the Motion Picture Association Of America for language throughout, and some violence.  The film's running time is two hours and three minutes.
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