Boxing clichés KO chameleonic Gyllenhaal in 'Southpaw'
Chameleonic actor Jake Gyllenhaal's light heavyweight boxing champ Billy "the Great" Hope can take on any contender with a record of 43 wins and no losses.
But when he faces the greatest heavyweight boxing clichés in movie history, he goes down for the count.
Just as he did as the skeletal TV video reporter in "Nightcrawler," Gyllenhaal goes more than the distance in Antoine Fuqua's "Southpaw" to create a mesmerizing, transformative character of the sort that Robert De Niro and Sean Penn would have been proud to play in their 20s and 30s.
As Billy the boxer, Gyllenhaal totally commits to projecting wild man barbarity in black trunks. His body, twisted knots of finely tuned muscles pulsating with screaming tattoos, comes spring-loaded into the ring, waiting for the moment when an unsuspecting opponent will finally pull his pin, then his flesh-covered grenade will explode in a furious flurry of fists.
Gyllenhaal speaks in halting, unsure sentences, as if he's lost more IQ points than fights. He moves like lightning in the ring. More like a disabled list athlete when he's not.
His iron-fisted wife Maureen (Rachel McAdams, a snapshot of sexual confidence and street savvy) worries about her husband fighting for much longer. In their palatial mansion adorned with expensive tasteless trappings, she wants him to take time for her and their little daughter Leila (Oona Laurence).
She warns him against his friends, purchased by money and stature.
"When the bubble pops," she says, "they're going to scatter like cockroaches!"
One night after a fight, a trash-talking boxer named Miguel Escobar (Miguel Gomez) taunts Billy to fight. Over Maureen's pleas, he does. Right then and there.
In the scuffle, Maureen falls mortally wounded. Billy lets out an inhuman howl that pierces the soul.
And in short order, they scatter like cockroaches, even his lifetime manager (Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson).
In his darkened castle, Billy goes to pieces. He loses the house. His title. His wealth. His self-respect. And his daughter, taken into state custody when he proves to be unfit as her father.
"Southpaw" moves with deliberate, cautious power for a while, before it becomes obvious that Fuqua's rise-and-fall-and-rise-again sports drama is being sucker-punched by boxing movie conventions older than Rocky Balboa.
It's not just a tale of redemption, but also one of payback.
A down-and-out Billy must humble himself before God, take a lowly job cleaning toilets at a local boxing gym, then hope that its sagely owner and boxing coach Tick Wills (Forest Whitaker) can be just enough of a Morgan Freeman character to retrain him to take back the title from the man responsible for his wife's death. (Cue the rap music montage, please.)
Fuqua, who established himself as a director of extreme macho violence in "Training Day," "Olympus Has Fallen" and "The Equalizer," fires up the boxing bouts with jabbing quick shots, demonic close-ups and point-of-view shots that put us in the pulsating center of the fight.
As remarkable as Gyllenhaal's character is, writer Kurt Sutter's screenplay doesn't spread the wealth around. Bad boy Miguel is a one-dimensional villain earning the hiss/boo responses to a "heel" in professional wrestling.
Despite an appealing performance by young Laurence, Billy's daughter functions as another prize to be won (over) along with his title.
In the end, Billy does pretty well at redemption.
But he can't protect himself from those cliched slow-motion boxing shots and the ever-hokey "heartbeat" sounds pounding away on the soundtrack. They're killers.
“Southpaw”
★ ★ ½
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Forest Whitaker, Rachel McAdams, Oona Laurence, 50 Cent
Directed by: Antoine Fuqua
Other: A Weinstein Company release. Rated R for language, violence. 123 minutes