Redemption doesn't need to be so over the top and rushed to attain

Rating: 5/10 (14 June 2017)

I pretty much decided to watch this because I figured it would be a formulaic yet entertaining little respite which wouldn't require much in the way of deep thinking on my part... something I could just sort of zone out and put the old noggin on auto- pilot and maybe shop for stuff on amazon or update my Instagram or check my email on the side too, you know? Basically I'm just saying that I wasn't at all expecting something groundbreaking and transformative here, okay? And Jake Gyllenhall is a solid actor no doubt. The actress who plays his wife is good, too. Rachel McAdams right? I get her confused with Elizabeth Banks all the time. They're both good... whatever, that's not the point here obviously.
Anyway, the movie starts out more or less how I would think. We have a boxer dude, Billy Hope, who is a hard-nosed, street wise family man with all the heart you would expect, but of course with the cliché below-average intelligence to go with it. He's a veteran, undefeated 43-0 light heavyweight champ who has a gorgeous wife who loves him deeply and genuinely, and a daughter around 10 or 11 who waits patiently in her bed at home for her mommy and daddy to come back after the fight which he wins, and is still able to tuck her in and give her a goodnight kiss as she counts the bruises on his face so lovingly. He then caps the night off with some well- deserved nookie from his beautiful lady... a seemingly perfect life. Obviously we know things are gonna go downhill.
But how his perfect life just falls apart after our expositional introduction is so dismissive of any realistic premise whatsoever, it is miles and miles beyond the standard suspension of disbelief that should be expected from any type of moderately intelligent audience whatsoever.
The writing of this movie at this point, and for the rest of it is essentially just throwing any and all credibility it may have established out the window just so that it can hit you over the head with the notion of redemption at the end. Billy loses his gorgeous best friend wife to a stray bullet after an altercation at charity event with a fighter-in-waiting who's been whining on the sideline for his shot at the champ. One of this antagonist's crew pulls out a gun in the middle of a fight between the two boxers in a room full of witnesses as if this was a teen gang violence movie or something. Basically it's a ludicrous way for Gyllenhall to lose his wife and begin his necessary breakdown in order to come back at the end. But this murder pretty much gets brushed aside, and NOBODY seems to do a damn thing in finding out who actually pulled the gun...including Gyllenhall. Then everyone seems to expect the dude to keep on business as usual with apparently no time allotted to grieve or be given a break. Oh and also even though he's the champ and undefeated, he's also of course somehow on the verge of bankruptcy right after losing his wife as well. And his manager.. played so laughably bad by 50 Cent.. is seen right after he loses his wife sitting ringside at the next fight with the same fighter who's crew murdered his wife. I mean... really? I'm not even going to bother going through the rest of all the ridiculous plot points.. how he loses custody of his daughter becomes the crux of what he needs to fight for... and that's when the story actually starts to become engaging and emotive. But the way we arrive there is so sensationalist, almost Kafka-esque in an unintended fashion due to the authority the state plays in removing his custody. If his fall had been more his own fault, perhaps he would have lost some standing in the viewer rooting for him but it would have been something that real people could identify with even more. It would have benefited with more real mistakes made on his end and simply not just being reckless in his grieving with seemingly no help from any friends even though he clearly has a crew of good guys he was surrounding himself with in the beginning. It just makes the journey he goes through ring hallow, and all it would have taken was more earnest care in actually developing a believable arch instead of just rushing to the redemption.
In fact, if the writer was so eager to get to the comeback, the rising from ashes of tragedy.. if he really just wanted to rush the audience to seeing Billy Hope restore his own hope and all that stuff etc etc... I think we shouldn't have ever actually seen any of his perfect life exposition at all. It should have just been gradually discovered through reference in the dialogue. That would have been more effective and sold the premise a lot better in the end. Gyllenhall makes the movie work enough because he's a great actor, but there were a lot of missed opportunities in the script because the writer was too eager to make the story about the breakdown and building back of a champ who loses his compass in the form of wife.
This movie would have been a lot more interesting if the first scene was Gyllenhall showing up at Wills gym, the first scene that Forest Whitaker is introduced in. If that's the opening scene, then we as the audience wouldn't know who Billy Hope is yet, we would just know he's a big deal to the other kids training at the gym in how they talk about him. That would have delivered a lot more intrigue to the story. The whole exposition sells this movie short and makes it almost laughable at points. Opportunities missed.