It is Such a Shame that "Southpaw" Wastes so Much Talent

Southpaw is not worth bothering the microwave

I'm predisposed to like movies about boxing. One of my all time favorite movies is "Raging Bull". That's the watermark for me and almost every other movie critic there is and ever will be. I also enjoy movies like "Ali", "The Great White Hope", "Million Dollar Baby", "Fighting" and even "Girlfight", that's a very good, very underrated boxing movie and, probably, Michelle Rodriguez's best acting performance to date and yes, I'm including her small, but recurring role as Anna Lucia Cortez on "Lost".

So, naturally, I was excited to see the movie "Southpaw" when it came out last year. I even mentioned it on one of our very early, possibly first, podcasts. I was expecting big things from this movie. It had Jake Gyllenhall, whom I really like, Rachael McAdams, who is an excellent actress and it was directed by Antoine Fuqua who directed "Training Day", another one of my all time favorites. It was also written by the guy that wrote "Sons of Anarchy". I never watched that show, but I heard only tremendous things about it.

I was on board. I didn't get to see it in the theaters, but I just recently watched it via my Netflix account and it may be the most melodramatic piece of overacting I've seen in quite some time. I was so underwhelmed and kind of mad that this movie I had such high hopes for, felt like a 2 hour waste of time. It starts out cool, with a bruised and battered Gyllenhall screaming into the camera and it pulls back to show him in the middle of a title bout, but, it was really downhill from there. It was almost like watching a soap opera. The story was a good idea. Prize fighter with a temper gets into a fight with his next opponent at a benefit and someone accidentally shoots his wife and kills her. Gyllenhall is now alone with their daughter and he's lost and drunk and high all the time. He loses custody , cleans his life up and gets his kid back.

Simple story, but the boxing is what had me intrigued. It was the direction and over acting and chewing of the scenery that lost me. Gylenhall is a wonderful actor, but there is only so many times I can watch him scream in agony over his deceased wife. Same goes for him getting drunk and stoned or threatening to hurt or kill other people. Rachel McAdams is only in the first 20 minutes of the movie, but her New York accent is dreadful and the way she interacts with Gyllenhall, there's absolutely no chemistry. Even her death scene was a bit too over the top. The little girl that played their daughter was the most generic "hard on her luck" kid they could find. Her direction and attitude was way to "woe is me" for a movie. Curtis Jackson, you may know him as 50 Cent, was a terrible villain. He tries to win you over at the beginning by seeming like he really cares about his fighter, but I think we all knew he was only in it for the money from the get go. It was way too obvious. The bad guy needs to have depth and almost a likability before we turn on them. Not in the case of 50 Cent's character. I knew almost immediately that he was a money grubbing bad guy. The only really decent acting in this movie came from Forrest Whittaker. He played Gyllenhall's new mentor, after his life fell apart, and even though he was paint by the colors character, Whittaker did a pretty good job. That's to be expected from an actor of his caliber though. I did enjoy most, definitely not all, but most of the scenes that he was involved with.

This brings me back to Gyllenhall. Not once did I believe his character. Sure, he got into great shape for this role, but aside from that, he was not very good. He was too moody in some scenes. Too angry and over the top in others. He didn't play the part of antihero very well at all. He's much more suited for a movie like "Nightcrawler" because he can really dig deep into that character. In "Southpaw", he was chewing all of the scenery. If McAdams accent was bad, Gyllenhall's was atrocious and I like Jake Gyllenhall, just not in this movie or this role.

That brings me to the director, Antoine Fuqua. He came out of the gate with guns blazing, directing the totally kick ass "Training Day". Then he tried to do a very similar project with "The Equalizer". That movie isn't very good. And "Olympus Has Fallen" was a train wreck. And now we have "Southpaw". I think he belongs in the same class as M Night Shyamalan and Neill Blomkamp. These guys started with a bang and now, they are going out with a whimper. It sucks too because I really like both Blomkamp and Fuqua, I could care less about Shyamalan.

I was very disappointed with "Southpaw". If they focused more on boxing and less on the melodramatics, I probably would've loved the movie. If you're thinking about watching this movie might I suggest you go watch "Raging Bull" instead. It's ten thousand times better and you already know you will enjoy it. "Southpaw" is not a good movie.

Don't waste your time.

Ty

Ty is the Pop Culture Editor for SeedSing and the other host of the X Millennial Man podcast. He once thought about becoming a championship boxer, then he heard about all the hitting. Follow Ty on twitter @tykulik.

Ty wants director Neill Blomkamp to get off the M. Night Shyamalan path

The first step to directing. Keep the film in the can.

I finally got around to seeing the movie "Chappie" this week, and while it wasn't awful, it wasn't that good either.

Dev Patel and Sharlto Copley are serviceable enough in the movie. Copley as the robot Chappie is quite good actually. He does the whole motion capture thing really well and makes Chappie seem life like. I think Copley is a very good actor in fact. I like him in all his roles. Patel is decent as the scientist that created the robotic police force, and while I enjoyed his performance, it was nothing special. It was just okay. My two biggest problems with the movie were Hugh Jackman's performance as the bad guy and the Johannesburg rap duo, Die Antwoord's performance. Jackman, whom I love as an actor the dude plays Wolverine, my all time favorite superhero, does not make a good bad guy. He's too nice of a guy, and for those of you out there saying, Wolverine is kind of a dick, Wolverine is still a good guy in the end. It wasn't for lack of trying on Jackman's part either, that's on the writers and director, he's just too nice of a person in real life, that I don't buy him as the bad guy. It doesn't fit. Die Antwoord's performance was just confusing. I don't know if they're playing themselves in this futuristic world, or if their characters are just big fans of Die Antwoord's music. For example, they each go by their rap names in the movie, and there's, at least two that I can remember seeing, times that Ninja(that's the guy in Die Antwoord) is wearing his own band's merchandise as his wardrobe. I was confused by the whole thing. The two of them aren't very good actors either, which didn't help their case. The movie was very formulaic and you could tell how the movie would end very early in the plot. It was another disappointment from Neill Blomkamp, who I really liked after seeing his first movie, "District 9".

This brings me to my main point and question of my blog today, is Neil Blomkamp the new M Night Shyamalan? Let's start by comparing each director's first movie. Shyamalan came out of the gate and crushed a grand slam with the brilliant, innovative, and probably biggest shock in a movie in my lifetime with "The Sixth Sense". Talk about a great debut. This movie was well written, well acted and perfectly directed. People talked about the ending for years, and "I see dead people" has become as big as "My wife!" or "I knew it was you, you broke my heart"(if you don't know those references, you need to get up to speed people!). Blomkamp's debut was just as unique as Shyamalan's and maybe even more innovative. I'm of course talking about the brilliant "District 9". I remember seeing posters at movie theaters a year before this movie came out that just had a shadow picture of an alien, and the saying, "Humans not allowed". I was immediately intrigued by this and found out any and all information I could about this upcoming alien movie. As more previews and clips came out, I got more and more excited. I saw the movie on opening night, and it not only live up to my expectations, but it exceeded them.

"District 9" takes place in Johannesburg and there's a race of aliens, known as "prawns" living in the slums. They're treated as second class citizens, and in his film debut, Sharlto Copley plays a wet behind the ears, yet eager police officer. He goes into the "prawns" area to extract and arrest some that are stealing from the humans. He gets poisoned by an alien and slowly starts to turn into one. It is so awesome to watch his character's transformation into an alien and the movie has a great secondary story about how higher class people treat people they feel are below them. If you haven't seen "District 9" stop reading this, watch it, and then come back and finish reading this, That movie is so great.

Unforunately, at least in Blomkamp's case, the same can't be said for his second movie, "Elysium". Another good premise about the upper and lower classes in society, but this movie just didn't work for me. Matt Damon was miscast as a working class, former bad boy trying to turn his life around. Jodie Foster plays the leader of the higher class people living on the rich planet Elysium, and she's your typical, bitchy rich lady that only cares about the high society folks and can do without the poor people. She also sports a terrible South African accent. It's so bad. I mean, it's terrible. The only person I enjoyed in this movie was Copley. He plays a bad ass assassin for Foster's character and he's awesome. He's a great bad guy and he kicks total ass. But, he cannot save this movie. It's just not a good movie.

Shyamalan's second movie, "Unbreakable", I personally like more than "The Sixth Sense". It's a cool, pseudo superhero movie that I feel is criminally underrated. Bruce Willis is on a train that has a brutal crash and he's the only survivor. He actually comes out unscathed. Samuel L Jackson plays a big comic book guy and he's very intrigued by Willis' character and the fact that he did not even get a scratch in the train wreck. They team up and do some cool, super hero type stuff. It's a really good movie and I highly recommend watching it.

I've already mentioned Blomkamp's third, and most recent movie, "Chappie". You all know how I feel about that. After the success of "The Sixth Sense" and the high of making "Unbreakable", Shyamalan's star was going up, and it was never going to come down. Or so we thought. He followed "Unbreakable" with the god awful, Joaquin Phoenix and Mel Gibson bomb of a movie "Signs". That movie sucks, but hey, you can't hit a home run every time. Certainly his next movie would be better, it had to be. Once again, nope, he made "The Village" and that movie is worse than "Signs". I think it's Nicolas Cage's version of "The Wicker Man" bad. That movie is confusing and awful. He followed that up with "Lady in the Water". You know that movie about a mermaid, or some bull shit, that a guy finds in his pool and she of course has special powers. So, three stinkers in a row. Was this a sign of things to come, or was he just in a slump? His next movie would determine his fate in my opinion. He had the great un fortune of deciding to put out "The Happening". You know this movie, the one were plants come to life and make people kill themselves and Mark Wahlberg plays a scientist and calls himself a douchebag at one point. This movie was so bad that I convinced a group of about eight people to walk out. A movie we all paid for, and we didn't stay for the whole thing. I'd never done that before, but that's how bad that movie is. His next two movies did nothing to prove me wrong, that he was past his prime. He released the horrendous "Last Airbender" and the stupid and contrite "After Earth". Both these movies are just plain awful. "The Last Airbender" is so bad that fans of the anime won't even acknowledge the movie as part of the series. That's pretty telling. Shymalan is now dabbling in television with the mini series "Wayward Pines", and while it started interesting, I didn't finish it because it was way to boring and falling into Shymalan's routine of posing way too many questions that there's no way they could all be answered in ten, one hour episodes.

While I feel that Shymalan's fate is sealed as a director(he peaked early and is now no good), I think there's still hope for Blomkamp. He's only made three movies. "District 9" is, by a wide margin, his best movie, but while I didn't like either "Chappie" or "Elysium", at least "Chappie" was a bit more interesting and a touch better than "Elysium". I hope for his sake he's not turning into Shymalan, but the way it's going now, that's what I unfortunately see happening.

Time will tell I suppose.

Ty 

Ty is the Pop Culture Editor for SeedSing and co-host of the X Millennial Man podcast. In the upcoming movie about SeedSing, Ty will have to wear Die Antwoord gear. Follow him on twitter @tykulik