Boxing film Southpaw puts Jake Gyllenhaal in Oscar contention

Jake Gyllenhaal, the star of Southpaw, should dry clean his tux for the Oscars.

L-R: Rachel McAdams and Jake Gyllenhaal in a scene from film Southpaw

Do fight films punch above their weight (that line was as unavoidable as a Mike Tyson uppercut) at the Academy Awards? Think of the boxing movies that have won Oscars, from Wallace Beery’s best actor performance in The Champ (1931) to Rocky and Raging Bull in the 1970s and 80s, the outstanding Muhammad Ali-George Foreman 2006 documentary When We Were Kings, Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby in 2004 and David O. Russell’s The Fighter five years ago and the answer seems to be yes. Films about baseball, by way of contrast, tend to win nominations but strike out on the night.

For this reason — but not for this reason alone — Jake Gyllenhaal might want to dry clean his tux. His performance as a champion boxer in Southpaw is one of sustained physical and emotional intensity, underpinned by a bodily transformation that renders him unrecognisable from his previous role in Nightcrawler.

FEATURE: Southpaw director Antoine Fuqua joins the fight club

Many boxing films centre on comebacks (The Champ, Russell Crowe’s underrated Cinderella Man) or improbable contenders (Rocky, The Fighter). Southpaw, directed byAntoine Fuqua (Training Day), may end up visiting those places, but it certainly does not start that way.

When we first meet Billy Hope (Gyllenhaal) he is the undefeated light-heavyweight champion of the world, preparing for his fourth title ­defence at New York’s Madison Square Garden. His motivational music is Timeflies’s Beast (“I’m a motherf..king beast”) and his mouthguard bears his name, a snarling message to his rivals: abandon hope all ye who enter here.

Sitting ringside are his manager Jordan Mains (Curtis Jackson aka the rapper 50 Cent, who is convincingly mercenary) and, most importantly, his beautiful wife Maureen (Rachel McAdams). Their young daughter Leila (13-year-old Oona Laurence, in a knockout performance) is back at the mansion with the nanny, shielded from the blood on the canvas.

Also in the crowd is an up-and-coming fighter, Miguel Escobar (Miguel Gomez), who taunts Hope as he celebrates his inevitable victory: “You ain’t never been hit by a real man. Why are you so scared to fight me?”

Post-fight, the scenes between Billy and Maureen, who have known each other since growing up orphans in Hell’s Kitchen, offer a beautiful contrast between his controlled violence at work and his tenderness at home. The air between Gyllenhaal and McAdams crackles.

She wants him to quit while he’s ahead. He’s one of those boxers, like Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa and Robert De Niro’s Jake LaMotta, who absorbs punishment. As someone says to him, stopping punches with your face is not defence. But Billy wants to keep fighting.

So far, so straightforward — but about 20 minutes in, everything changes. What happens is so dramatic and such a surprise that I will not reveal it here. Suffice it to say the rooted certainties of Billy’s world are ripped out from under him. From this point he becomes a different man — and this becomes a different fight film — and Gyllenhaal shows in scene after scene why an Oscar nomination will be for a lot more than his abs. Southpaw does not resist the conventions of the boxing film — there’s the damaged ex-fighter who runs a low-rent gym (the ever brilliant Forest Whitaker), there’s the scenes of street running and ring training, there’s the (thrillingly executed) bouts — but like the best of them it’s about much more than two men hitting each other.

Aleksander Bach’s Hitman: Agent 47 is based on a video game and as a cinematic work epitomises the worst qualities of that genre: thin plot, banal dialogue, one-dimensional characters — because all that matters is the graphic, dehumanising violence. That would be almost tolerable if alleviated by some comedy. While there are flashes of self-aware humour from the titular Agent 47 (Rupert Friend from TV’s Homeland), these are few and far between.

Agent 47 is a survivor of a decommissioned government program that produced genetically modified assassins, “perfect killing machines ... men without humanity”. At the outset he seems to be out to kill Katia van Dees (Hannah Ware), daughter of the scientist (a miscast Ciaran Hinds) who created the agent program.

Also after Katia is an evil organisation — or perhaps it’s the CIA (I am not sure, and nor does it matter) — that has its own GM assassin (Zachary Quinto). Is Agent 47 killer or protector? The homage — to be kind — to the first two Terminator films is hard to miss, but if there was a point to that it is lost amid the countless starbursts of blood as people are shot in the head.

Southpaw (M)

4 stars

National release

Hitman: Agent 47 (MA15+)

1.5 stars

National release