Review of Southpaw (2015) by Adam L — 15 Oct 2015

Overall, this was a decent boxing movie and I actually praise the approach they took to focusing on the struggles of many fighters outside of the ring. While I cannot think of any story regarding a fighter to have his wife shot by an incident related to another fighter, the tragedy of losing everything is all too common in the sport. Also, many fighters come from rough, impoverished backgrounds and often return to those areas and go back to training youth. This story encapsulated the little known struggles of boxers rarely depicted in Hollywood.

However, for a movie that seems to aim at authenticity there were two major flaws in the movie. First, was regarding the promoter 50 cent depicted. The movie did a good job of depicting him as your typical, scandalous promoter. However, only giving 6 weeks or 8 weeks between fights for a world champion well known fighter is not accurate in the modern era of the sport. Most champions only fight twice a year, maybe three times, but often only once a year. Furthermore, the damage the movie depicted Hope taking during the fights would take several weeks, possibly over a month to fully heal before resuming training. Boxing used to operate like that, but this movie is depicting a modern era fighter and that depiction is far fetched. Also, it is a business, and most major fights need several months to be built up in the media, making the "6 week" notice of the final fight highly, highly unlikely.

Finally comes the obvious error of the movie, and shows the writer does not watch boxing very often to miss this error. The scores were impossible. It is a movie, so lets assume I cannot accurately score any round but the two rounds with knockdowns. Also, let's assume no rounds were even since under the 10 point must system there are rarely even rounds short of a point deduction (in this movie the 12th round point deduction renders that possibility impossible due to the knockdown). That means regardless of the final scores, automatically 2 points must be subtracted from escobar for the knockdown and point deduction, and 1 from hope for the knockdown. Here are the final scores: 115-113 escobar, 115-114 hope, 116-112 hope. Assuming there are no knockdowns, even rounds, or point deductions in any 12 round fight there is only a possibility of 228 combined points. Which is what the final scores in this fight represent, plus one round that must have been scored 10- 10 for the 115-114 scorecard meaning that had 229 total points. However, assuming the norm occurred as I indicated above, at best there were 225 available points to be scored.

115-113 for escobar represents a twelve round score with no knockdowns scored 7 rounds to 5. At best in this fight that could read 113-112 for escobar.

Lets assume a judge for whatever reason scored a round 10-10 for the 115-114 scorecard which means thats a 6 rounds to 5 scorecard with one even, it still could only possibly read 114-112 for hope.

And the final scorecard indicated a typical 8 rounds to 4 scorecard for hope, which at best should equal 115-110.

Such a simple error, but it is an error that is inexcusable for a movie trying to be authentic. It comes off as a lazy error where the story teller did not do his homework. As well as depicting a promoter from a different era of time between championship fights. OVerall, a good job depicting what goes on outside of the ring for many fighters. Gyllenhall, McAdams, and Whitaker gave stellar performances. The movie also did a good job depicting training when it showed it. However, the errors in how they depicted a modern promotion of a fight, scoring errors, and even how they depicted action in the ring cannot be ignored. This is after all a boxing movie. If it ended at trying to pick up the pieces after his wife's death and he did not fight again, then I can ignore the mistake. However, a major portion of the movie regarded how 50 cent promoted the fights, and the final half hour of the movie was dedicated to the fight against escobar. Therefore, the errors cannot be ignored because they brought too much attention to the actual fight and this movie failed in several ways to accurately depict a boxing match.