Steady Linear Style with Punch-Drunk Payoff

Rating: 6/10 (15 September 2015)

Southpaw is a lucky film. Lucky in the same way that Fast and the Furious is lucky. It will make money, no matter how great, mediocre, or truly terrible it is. Luckily it isn't all that bad.
Personally I don't feel the world needed another generic fighting movie. Mark Wahlberg's "The Fighter" excelled at this formula very recently, but that was mainly due to Christian Bale's Oscar winning performance. Southpaw, unfortunately, did not have it's own Christian Bale.
Sure, Forrest Whitaker appears half way through the second act, but his character is not all that memorable, and the dialogue between his character and Gyllenhaal's seems clumsy and forced. It's almost like they needed to add more to the movie and just plonked in all of Whitaker's scenes to beef it up. There is an emotional part attached to the training sequence, which again, just feels like they wanted to add extra emotion and sadness and just thought "Ahh let's make the audience feel more misery here, we just haven't made them feel miserable enough yet".
The story itself is linear and requires no thought or reasoning. It is not engaging or intriguing. There are no twists or turns to watch out for, but it does stick to the hero's journey quite well. The fall from grace of the main protagonist does require an immense suspension of disbelief, for the financial questions it raises alone.
I felt that the exposition was jammed into my face on several occasions. An announcer stating that both the protagonist and his wife were both orphans, during a boxing match is just not sensible script writing.
Yes the story made me feel emotion for the character, but I pitied him. I genuinely despised him at times too. I don't believe that his redemption was hard fought enough and his self revelation was practically none existent. He is practically the same character at the end of the fight as he was at the beginning. He really doesn't learn all that much. The daughter character actually has a real self revelation and grows through the story, which I'm sure was not the writer's intention.
Finally, the term Southpaw is a misnomer and again, I feel it was jammed in at the end, when they couldn't think of a catchy enough soundbite. I'll be honest, it did work on me, but it was a very orthodox movie in every way and apart from the impressive physical transformation that Jake Gyllenhall went through; there wasn't much to take notice of.
It kept my attention for the timespan barely, but this was not the knockout I was looking for unfortunately.