Review Roundup: Jake Gyllenhaal Tries to Turn His Life Around in SOUTHPAW

Jake Gyllenhaal plays boxer Billy Hope in the new action-drama, SOUTHPAW. SOUTHPAW was directed by Antoine Fuqua and written by Kurt Sutter.

The film follows the story of Billy Hope, a boxer who turns to trainer Tick Willis (Forest Whitaker), to help turn his life around after losing his wife in a tragic accident and his daughter to child protection services.

SOUTHPAW stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Rachel McAdams, Forest Whitaker, Oona Laurence, 50 Cent, and Skylan Brooks.

Let's see what the critics had to say!

A. O. Scott, The New York Times: I WISH I could say "Southpaw" was a knockout, or even a contender, that it went the distance or scored on points. But it's strictly an undercard bout, displaying enough heart and skill to keep the paying customers from getting too restless.

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: The powerful boxing scenes, vividly shot from Madison Square Garden to Vegas by Mauro Fiore and edited by John Refoua, help distract from the father-daughter scenes that outdo The Champ (the Wallace Beery original and the Jon Voight remake) for gooey sentiment. Amazingly, Gyllenhaal never cheats on his character's sense of dignity. Against the odds, he keeps you in Billy's corner. That's a champ.

Justin Chang, Variety: You can practically smell the blood, the sweat and the fierce actorly commitment rising fromJake Gyllenhaal's bruised and tattooed body in "Southpaw," a bluntly conventional melodrama about a champion boxer forced to undergo a grim crucible of physical, emotional and spiritual suffering. Yet the undeniable intensity of Gyllenhaal's bulked-up, Method-mumbling performance may leave you feeling more pummeled than convinced in this heavy-handed tale of redemption, in which director Antoine Fuqua once more demonstrates his fascination with codes of masculine aggression, extreme violence and not much else. Creakily plotted over the course of its rise-and-fall-and-rise-again trajectory, this partly Chinese-funded production may land enough visceral blows to catch on with audiences on its July 24 release through the Weinstein Co., but seems less likely to attain the prestige-hit status of superior efforts like "Million Dollar Baby" and "The Fighter."

Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair: Do we really need another boy-movie rumination on brute strength and tenacity, do we need more hokey, puffed-up brooding about what's essentially two people punching each other in the head? Which is to say, do we really need Antoine Fuqua's new boxing film, Southpaw, proficiently acted and intermittently rousing as it may be? I'd say we don't, but that may be simple bias at work, my personal boxing fatigue trying to spoil it for everyone else. If you're a fan of the genre-all the manly seething and grunting of it-then you'll probably find SOUTHPAW a worthy, if minor, entry into the canon.

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian: It's the most overhyped event of the year: a hammy, cynical, empty boxing movie written by Kurt Sutter and directed by Antoine Fuqua, watchable in its first act but then increasingly dull and overwrought, fudging the idea of whether the audience should get behind its "redemption-revenge" motivation. The drama is aggressively bulked up like Jake Gyllenhaal himself in the lead, who shows none of the live-wire charisma he had in Nightcrawler; here he gets a gym-bunny makeover, mumbling machismo and a tendency to steroidal, sub-Hulk roaring in the ring.

Kyle Smith, New York Post: Mainly, the movie is a showcase for a chemically enhanced Jake Gyllenhaal, sporting shelves of store-bought muscle, and confusing bodily transformation with craft. As for his twitching, mumbling, mewling, capital-A Anguished performance, at times it veers from "acting" to "overacting" to "Nicolas Cage."

Joe Neumaier, New York Daily News: As the ringside announcers might say bombastically in "Southpaw," a great trainer can make a difference. What he can't do, though, is turn a movie this stitched together into a knockout.

Ann Hornaday, Washington Post: Filmed with a de-saturated palette and painfully graphic close-ups by Antoine Fuqua, "Southpaw" plays like a musical in which the performance numbers are its fights, a pageant of beat-downs, bloodlettings and bodies plummeting to the canvas like so many felled sequoias. Gyllenhaal proves himself a compelling, even mesmerizing presence amidst the action, even at its most hyperbolic and cliched. In last year's "Nightcrawler," he was alarmingly emaciated and wild-eyed, giving off a mangy, half-feral vibe. Here, he's beefed up, impressively cut and prodigiously tattooed, his face reduced to a barely recognizable pulp of scrapes, lacerations, bulges and bruises. When "Southpaw" switches TRACKS from revenge narrative to redemption tale, Gyllenhaal doesn't skip a beat. He even makes the de rigueur makeover montage - shots of him tossing around the ol' medicine ball and hitting a truck tire with a sledgehammer - less banal and more convincing than it deserves to be. "Southpaw" may be rote, predictable and mawkish, but none of those FAULTS lie in its star. Even when he looks like an unholy mess, he transcends the movie he's in.

Chris Nashawaty, Entertainment Weekly: But just as director Antoine Fuqua starts to close in on something interesting and unexpected, he retreats to the safety of his corner and gives us what we've seen too many times before: a predictable flurry of melodramatic jabs when what he really needed to throw at us was a haymaker we couldn't see coming-the knockout punch of a southpaw.

Deborah Young, Hollywood Reporter: A taut boxing yarn about a champ who loses it all and has to fight his way back to keep custody of his daughter, SOUTHPAW sticks to tried-and-tested genre rules, yet an edgy cast - led by formidable leading man Jake Gyllenhaal - keeps the story in sharp focus. Director Antoine Fuqua has shown his talent for bringing out the shadowy side of nice guys like Denzel Washington in The Equalizerand Training Day. Here Gyllenhaal gets the makeover as a bloodied, battered but magnetic prize-fighter. Set for a late July release after its competition bow at the Shanghai Film Festival, it has the chops to draw the high-testosterone male demographic, but feels too macho-centric to cross over to the Million Dollar Baby crowd. An award-worthy Gyllenhaal is the main attraction.

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