Review of Southpaw (2015) by Ydnar4 — 27 Aug 2015

The best place to start with this movie is with the star Jake Gyllenhaal. This guy has managed to transform himself again into a completely different character. Once again I was completely engulfed by his performance and he lost himself in another role. He has been on a roll after some great performances in Prisoners and Nightcrawler last year. Gyllenhaal has been aggressively hunting for his first Oscar nomination and even more so after being snubbed last year for Nightcrawler. This performance may not be better than Nightcrawler’s but Soutpaw is a completely different film and its not just an acting showcase but its also a great achievement for director Antoine Fuqua. Gyllenhaal showed a lot of dedication for his role by working incredibly hard in order to get in shape. He has never looked this fit in any other film.

Forest Whitaker is also outstanding in this movie. He is just the perfect fit for a boxing training. He is naturally a pretty big guy and he brings his A-game for this role. I’m sure the academy has got to put both Gyllenhaal and Whitaker’s performances in consideration for the 2016 Oscars although I do not think that they are guaranteed to be nominated. Rachael McAdams was great in this movie and 50 Cent. Who knew 50 Cent was actually a good actor? This is definitely the best role I’ve seen him play.

Southpaw is certainly one off Antoine Fuqua’s best films. This film is very emotionally engaging and there were several times where this movie really gave me the chills. The boxing was very well directed which is obviously very important and its sometimes overlooked. From a direction stand point this film might be the best Fuqua has done to date which is pretty impressive considering some of his past works.

This film is great but is still not perfect. Boxing films do have their clichés and Southpaw does not completely avoid them. There are some resemblances to Rocky, Million Dollar Baby and other boxing films, but for the most part I was able to overlook that because of the great performances and direction. The other small issue that I had with this film was the young girl played by Oona Laurence. I know that kids are not easy to work with and this young girl was really good in most of his scenes but there were just a few issues in some scenes and her performance just wasn’t quite consistent. Despite these issues I really enjoyed Southpaw and I would recommend this film to any movie fan.