Extremely "Hollywoodic" and not very realistic.

Rating: 4/10 (9 November 2015)

I gave my vote of 4 for decent performance by lead actors. Gyllenhaal is one of the best actors out there and Whitaker always was one of the greatest. Other than that the movie is extremely unrealistic tear squeezer - from the start point, where the main character depicted as sort of a brawler boxer who win his fights by getting beaten for ten rounds and then managing to land a lucky punch to knockdown his opponent, through Hopes fallout and to his expected comeback at the end. Most of the issues I have with this movie have broadly discussed by others here so I only want to expand on the closing scene of the movie, which in my opinion is simply moronic.
----------Big spoiler---------- So this is how it goes: Hope's daughter flies to Las Vegas accompanied by her social worker. She seems to be exited as if she were to watch Frozen movie and not to see her father get bitten. The fight goes like it supposed to, Billy Hope is getting bitten and out-boxed at every round. At some point he recalls that he actually can protect himself and he starts doing so. By the way, if you were thinking that Billy is a southpaw boxer as the movie title may suggest you were wrong - he is not. Southpaw refers to some weird move that Billy's coach taught him just before the fight. And there you go, 10 sec before last round end Billy switches his stance for the first time in his career and with a devastating uppercut knocks his opponent down and although he managed to come up, the time is off. Billy Hope wins by split decision and back to the track. For me, this ending is an apotheoses of southpaw's grotesque story line, a hollywoodized drama genre that converges to "Be good and everything will be right" maxim.