More schlocky than Rocky...

Rating: 1/10 (28 January 2016)

Just for the record, Muhammad Ali was not a southpaw- yet, in the movie PHANTOM PUNCH, one of the worst boxing movies ever made, he IS. That's known as not paying attention to detail. In SOUTHPAW, the title character, although a "southpaw," boxes from an orthodox stance, not a southpaw stance. Punchy Rocky Balboa was a southpaw who fought from a southpaw stance (far too often, in far too many movies, his head swelling to unbelievable proportions). In both SOUTHPAW and all 57 installments of ROCKY, the lead actors affect "punchy" attitudes and chew the scenery unmercifully (as bad in that respect as Paul Newman in SOMEBODY UP THERE LIKES ME, yet another woefully miscast boxing movie)- though better the scenery than somebody's ears... As if all this weren't bad enough, we have HBO's "boxing analysts" babbling on at ringside (making SOUTHPAW the longest HBO advertisement ever made). This mega-melodrama is patently ridiculous and could only have been conceived by someone who doesn't know s--- about boxing (and watching Cinderella MAN doesn't count)- not to mention Dramatic Resolution (Was the murderer ever found out...? Not that I recall.). The reference to "Night Train," the music Sonny Liston listened to while training, was, one supposes, some kind of half-a--ed "in-joke," though it WAS good to see that Victor Ortiz has found himself another vocation. There are a number of Real Life Fighters who would make interesting subjects for a boxing movie: Jersey Joe Walcott (whose style I emulated more than any other when I fought), Jerry Quarry, Do Ku Kim, Alexis Arguello, Hector Camacho, Billy Collins, Ron Lyle, etc., but there's probably nobody who would even know where to begin with ANY of them. A boxing movie should focus as much on BOXING, its perfection and tactics, etc., as Martial Arts movies focus on the mastering of Martial Arts. (Which may be why we'll never see such a movie: What filmmaker has a legitimate GRASP of Boxing? NONE that I know of. The closest approximation would be Bruce Lee, who understood more about both hand to hand combat AND filmmaking than anyone before or since. Or perhaps EVER. It would've been interesting, indeed, to see what HE could've done with a boxing movie...) I've seen more in gyms than can be IMAGINED by most "boxing writers." I've seen amateurs fighting so fiercely that they knocked each other's headgear off (no easy task); I've seen guys get punched through the ropes to land on their head on hardwood floors; I've seen more teeth get knocked out than a dentist on his busiest day. From MY VIEW FROM THE CORNER by Angelo Dundee: "He's on his own, out there in the loneliest spot in the world, the center of the ring, just him, the other guy, and the ref. And that other guy is there to hurt him and the ref can't help him..." SOUTHPAW is just another (bad) example of somebody who doesn't really have a grasp of boxing cranking out crap that should never have seen the light of day. As a trainer once told me: "Nobody goes fifteen rounds with the heavy bag and wins." In boxing, there are no excuses, only results.