Good Characters, Weak Story

Rating: 5/10 (25 August 2015)

Southpaw is a film that had a potential to be really good but it failed to achieve that goal. The cast is great and give us good and believable characters and if the film had a better plot they could have really shined. Jake Gyllenhaal gives another great performance and I wish his character could have had a better story.
Instead the story is clichéd and very derivative. Some films can make it work despite all that but Southpaw brought nothing to make it truly well liked and is therefore placed amid mediocrity.
Without going into plot spoilers I will only say my biggest problem was with the contrived drama. It seemed fake and over Hollywood-ized. It went against the sense of realism that the movie was trying to build. Basically full of those moments where the music gets sad and you're supposed to get sad because they tell you to but you don't because the story has not been built good enough.
Which is not to say I didn't enjoy it all. Some parts were interesting but they don't really come together to a pleasing whole. Southpaw might be a good watch at home, on the TV, but for the big screen there is nothing grand about it.