Rocky 7: A Cliché Reincarnation

Rating: 1/10 (19 May 2016)

If you are thinking about watching Southpaw, you might as well just watch its trailer and call it a day. This way you'll already know most of what the movie encompasses and waste only about 2 and half minutes of your life, opposed to the 2 hours it entails.
Realistically speaking, the movie is a horrific stretch of what the trailer already reveals. Billy Hope, "light heavyweight champion of the world", is challenged by wannabe competitor Miguel 'Magic' Escobar; and when a fight breaks out between the two, Hope's wife is shot and killed in a poorly staged lobby scene. The remainder of the movie consists of him falling apart because of his wife's death, which leads to him losing everything from his house, to custody of his daughter. Sound familiar? Probably because the plot is such a generic cliché.
If you think it's going to happen, that's probably because it will. This movie follows exactly what you'd expect, sliding in any and all clichés to do so; from Billy hitting rock bottom, to finding a trainer that can get him back into shape and onto the boxing ring again, the film does it all. Tick Willis (the trainer) who seemingly had a hatred for pro-boxing and wanted nothing to do with helping Billy, seems to magically forget this as he decides to train him. The boxing scenes in the movie contain the typical trades that leave both competitors bleeding, with the occasional smack talk about Billy's wife. Although the two are surrounded by numerous fans and cameras, the intended intense fighting scenes become dull from having little difference from any other boxing movie. While the audience in the movie seemed entertained in this fight, all I could do was yawn and pray for it to be over.
The director, Antoine Fuqua has made 21 movies to this day, most of which are crime related action movies. It's not hard to see that Southpaw was his first boxing movie, it's even easier to see that he should stick to crime related action movies. Jake Gyllenhaal spent five months working on his body, preparing for this film; if only the writing had half as much effort put into it; then perhaps the movie could have been entertaining. The original actor was actually supposed to have been Eminem, but he was smart enough to realize that this film wasn't going anywhere; then again, neither is he. But looking at the movie again, let's be real – if Jake Gyllenhaal being shirtless for most of the movie can't save it, nothing can.