Southpaw (2015) - Men Must Have Control.

★★★☆☆

‘Southpaw’ tells two things, I guess, that is defense is as important as attacks, not sometimes but all the time, if you wanna be the final winner. Second, men must have control. To do that, you gotta have some faith. No matter what faith you prefer, you gotta have some, or you may lose control of your life to others and their fickle point of views.

The film’s Jake Gyllenhaal’s one-man show. Here again he’s transformed himself into something we’ve never seen before. And this guy from ‘Brokeback Mountain’ as I first knew him, really deserves an award or something for his true commitment in acting. He’s full of surprises indeed. The story’s kinda predictable though. The boxing matches looking pretty realistic show the roughness and violence of the game, and a little bit of beauty too. The film basically bears a lot of pain and struggles of a man, through the ending that is of a triumph like expected. It’s just that it lacks some real highlights or emotional moments that are able to earn some tears probably because it manages to keep the tone as real and down-to-earth as possible.

The man is called Billy ‘The Great’ Hope. I remember I’ve talked a lot about hope here. Without hope, we can’t possibly carry on for sure, but hope itself is also the cause of disappointment and suffering. Like it or not, life goes on in contradictions, but how you look at it is always up to you!