An amazingly well acted boxing film.

Rating: 8/10 (4 October 2015)

There might be some spoilers in here.
Billy Hope was a good boxer, he was the best. But then there happens a tragedy. His wife gets shot. After this event everything goes downhill for him. He can't see his daughter anymore, he loses a lot of his money. After a while he decides that it has been enough, and starts to get back in the ring. To do this he has do be trained again. This time by Tick Willis.
The directing and cinematography were handled good. I found that a lot of scenes looked good, but sometimes the cinematographer chose some interesting angles and at times they didn't look that good. What I liked the most was that the director put the camera as the face of the boxer in the fighting scenes, how the camera took the hits or dodged them. This really brought you into the moment just like the slow motion. Due to this you felt more emotion in these scenes which I liked. The fight scenes in the boxing ring were nicely shot, with no shaky cam. But the directing, when Escobar provokes Billy and they start fighting, was a bit all over the place. You couldn't really see what was going on. The tension in the movie was very well. The beginning fighting scene was already tense, just like the last fighting scene. In the end of my review I am going to talk some more about this scene. The boxing is also very realistic. Overall I liked the first part of the movie the most, because there were more clichés in the second part of "Southpow"
The acting of this movie is just mind-blowingly good. Espaccialy from Jake Gyllenhaal. He played Billy Hope, a top boxer who goes through some terrible moments in this movie, the death of his wife, not getting the chance of seeing his daughter. Due to this he also has some anger management issues. By Gyllenhaals performance you can really see how broken Billy is by all this. What I also liked about Gyllenhaal was how he transformed his body into the one of Billy Hope. Just some months after "Nightcrawler" Where he played a skinny man and now he is this muscular man. The movie also stars Rachel McAdams. She plays the wife of Billy. Even though she is in the movie for a small bit, she was also amazing. 50 cent plays the first manager of Billy, but he switches sides and becomes the manager of Escobar. By 50 Cent's performance I was surprised, because he was really good in "Southpow". But the one that surprised me the most is Oona Laurence, she played Leila Hope, the daughter of Billy. How she and Gyllenhaal played together was just nice to look at. Oona was very convincing and she deserves an Oscar nomination for her role. Forest Whitaker who played Tick Willis, the new trainer of Billy. He plays like I said the new trainer of billy, but due to the good acting you can see that he has also done his time. And with this I don't mean that he has been in prison, but that he is also a very damaged person.
The writing was not to bad, but it wasn't great either. There were a lot of clichés, like the training montage. But the training montage still had a nice song over it. The story was also kind of predictable. But the writing did do something good. It made you feel bad. When Mo (the wife of Billy) gets killed you immediately feel bad for Billy. And the movie has some other of these sad moments like when they take away his daughter. But for me personally the most sad moment is when his daughter gets mad at him and says that he should have been the one that was shot and not his wife. There is also some stupid dialogue at times, but overall the script was good. Now I am going to talk about the final fighting scene and the ending. The final fighting scene was very tense, but you could already see that Billy was going to win. If you were going to compare it with the fighting scene of "Warrior", you could say that the one from "Warrior" was way better, and this was because you kind of cared about the two characters and couldn't find out who was going to win. But the ending was very emotional and tear jerking.
Overall I think this is a fun movie, Even though there are some clichés. The acting was amazing and the directing was good. I would definitely recommend this movie if you are a fan of boxing movies.