Southpaw ***

The hype surrounding Antoine Fuqua’s boxing movie has been extraordinary ever since publicity shots of Jake Gyllenhaal’s drastic physical transformation were released earlier this year.

The result is somewhat less impressive; it’s an unoriginal redemption story; pumped-up, flashy and overly sentimental.

Gyllenhaal plays Billy Hope, the world light-heavyweight champion – a dedicated boxer and committed husband and father. After attending a charity event with his wife(Rachel McAdams) Billy is taunted by an upstart fighter which leads to a brawl and an accidental shoot-out in the hotel lobby. Things get worse and after turning to drink and drugs, his life spirals out of control until he joins a gym run by Titus Willis (Forest Whitaker) – Billy tries to convince Whitaker’s wise-mentor character to train him and turn his life around.

The narrative arc of a boxing or fighting movie is very well-worn and it’s not just that Fuqua is aware of the genre conventions, he actively doesn’t want to do anything adventurous with them. It's strikingly shot - the frame glimmers with blood,sweat and dazzling floodlights - and occasionally the film approaches an interesting thematic idea - the idea being that Hope is a man without any emotional control, he is full of rage and pathos but the only way he can beat his nemesis is to transcend this pain and loss. But the film always seems to circumvent any depth in favor of a nonsensical 'revenge without vengeance' subtext.

The problem is largely due to the empty melodrama that surrounds the fight sequences. In Raging Bull it seemed as though the drama was in a state of permanent tension and aggression whether Ray LaMotta was in the ring or at home. Southpaw has an unsatisfyingly soft and mawkish centre partly mitigated by its central performances – all of which are strong.