The Martian

THE MARTIAN

** SPOILERS **

The Martian is as unusual an anomaly as a human being surviving alone on Mars for over a year: a major Hollywood blockbuster where there are no obvious villains, no turns or betrayals, and where every character is an stalwart example of the best and brightest a person can be, all working together to solve a seemingly insurmountable problem. The best and brightest of all is Matt Damon, in maximum movie star mode as astronaut Mark Watney, a heroic botanist accidentally left behind and thought dead when his team is forced to abort their 31 day Mars mission. His forlorn crew mates, including Kate Mara, Sebastian Stan, Michael Pena, and their commander Jessica Chastain, mourn his loss, and the Director of NASA, Jeff Daniels, announces to the world that Mark Watney died on Mars. Except Watney is very much alive, and must find a way to continue to survive alone on a hostile alien world with the supplies he has on hand until he can contact NASA and be rescued. The next mission to Mars is scheduled in four years. What can he do? How can he stay alive? Watney's answer to all his problems: "science the shit out of it."

Problem: Food. Watney realizes he has enough food intended orginally for six people but even with rationing, he'll run out long before rescue comes. Solution: become the first and greatest farmer Mars has ever seen, using the crew's discarded feces and Martian dirt to grow crops of potatoes. Problem: Water.  Solution: Luckily, Watney knows the formula to make water and only manages to blow himself up once in the process. Problem: communicating with NASA. Solution: Watney, takes his land rover out on a dangerous excursion and finds the Pathfinder probe that arrived on Mars long before he did. Its radio linkup to NASA still works. Voila! Conversation and email are now possible. Watney's efforts to survive are simply ingenious. But even if nothing else goes wrong -- and lots of things go terribly wrong -- Watney is still months, if not years, away from rescue. 

On Earth, a team of dedicated minds at NASA, including Sean Bean, Donald Glover, Mackenzie Davis, and lead by Chiwetel Ejiofor, put their giant brains and resources to work to bring Watney home. The Martian gives us a rosy and inviting view of NASA, where despite politics and internal squabbling, plans are made to rescue the first man ever to survive on Mars alone. When NASA's efforts to save time and cut corners end in mission failure, The Martian offers an extraordinary solution, giving us a glimpse of what can happen if the Chinese space program and NASA are able to work together. "This is not about politics, strictly cooperation between space agencies," the Chinese announce, extraordinarily. Like Apollo 13, which The Martian is a spiritual successor of, space and all that can go wrong in space, is the villain and the problem, and the welcome message is human beings, working together, can overcome anything.

Directed by Sir Ridley Scott, who delivers his tightest and most crowd-pleasing film in a decade,  The Martian is a prime example of how to adapt a bestselling novel. Screenwriter Drew Goddard retained most of the ingenious and humorous plot and character beats of the novel, often verbatim, while Sir Ridley uses the power of cinema to deliver rousing emotional moments. The third act attempt to rescue Watney is pure hero stuff, as his crew mates, who turned their Hermes space ship around back to Mars, put their own lives on the line to fetch their friend.  A malnourished and emaciated Watney, strapped to a stripped down tin can missing a roof and rocketed through the Martian atmosphere to literally be caught by his friends doing "a flyby," is a white knuckle, edge-of-your-seat thrill ride. Like Guardians of the Galaxy a year ago, The Martian embraces (with a lot of complaints from Watney) pop hits from the 1970s, which has now become Hollywood's go-to soundtrack for deep space adventure. One hopes The Martian reignites public interest in NASA and space exploration. The Martian shines a brilliant light on what can be achieved by intelligent people from all walks of life working united towards a common goal. It's simply a joy to watch a movie called The Martian and come out of it feeling really good about humanity.

Black Mass

BLACK MASS

** SPOILERS **

"Did he take you trick or treating?" asks the frightened, suspicious Marianne Connolly (Julianne Nicholson) of her husband, FBI agent John Connolly (Joel Edgerton). She, like the audience, is trying to suss out just exactly what lies behind the unwavering, destructive loyalty her husband has to one James "Whitey" Bulger (Johnny Depp), John's friend since childhood, personal hero, and the most notorious crimelord in South Boston. When we first meet Whitey in director Scott Cooper's stately, arresting Black Mass, he admonishes one of his lieutenants for repeatedly sticking his "fat, filthy fingers" in the shared peanut bowl at their local dive bar. We think for a moment maybe Whitey Bulger's not such a bad guy, a criminal with a moral code, perhaps. Soon, we meet John Connolly, newly minted and seemingly heroic FBI agent with big plans to take down the Italian mafia in Boston's North End. It doesn't take Black Mass long to violently blow both those preconceptions out of the water. Whitey and Connolly are two corrupt sides of the same coin, and their unholy "alliance" would sink the city of Boston into a real-life mire of murder and crime in the 1970s and 1980s, the aftershocks of which still makes headlines today.

By the admission of his own people, who were arrested and plea bargained to turn state's evidence against Whitey, James Bulger was a small time player who served 9 years in Alcatraz and ran the Winter Hill Gang in South Boston. "Suddenly, he was a kingpin." Black Mass details how Whitey's rapid rise to power occurred when he was approached by his boyhood friend Connolly to be an informant to the FBI. "I ain't no rat," Whitey declares. (He would later be at pains to justify to his people how what he did wasn't being a rat when the truth ended up as a front page expose in the Boston Globe.) But Whitey had a plan, enabled by Connolly, who promised him non-interference from the FBI as long as he provided the intel they needed to bring down the Cosa Nostra. The one condition: Whitey can't kill anybody. This was simply too much to ask and Bulger had no intention and was incapable of adhering to this request. Whitey's intel was valuable but came peacemeal, while his true activities -- consolidating his personal power over the rackets in Boston -- were covered up by Connolly. Meanwhile, Whitey was killing whomever he saw as a threat, be it rival gangsters, businessmen opposed to his interests in World Jai-Alai in Miami, snitches who betrayed him, or even teenage prostitutes. Whitey was a brazen executioner; killing his enemies in broad daylight and with his bare hands. Caught in the middle of this quagmire between his criminal brother and his corrupt federal agent friend was Whitey's brother Billy Bulger (Benedict Cumberbatch), then the State Senator for Massachusetts.

Johnny Depp, whose ghostly white contact lenses and balding visage make him resemble the ancient vampiric look of Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker's Dracula, delivers a mesmerizing performance of pure malevolence. Depp plays Whitey as a remorseless psychopath in Black Mass, perhaps too stripped of recognizable humanity, especially in the second half of the movie after the deaths of his beloved mother and young son. Edgerton's Connolly devolves into a comical, transparent farce of a lawman as his fellow FBI agents played by Kevin Bacon and Adam Scott grow suspicious of his connection to Whitey and the new federal prosecutor (Corey Stoll) makes it his mission to bring down Bulger, and Connolly along with him. Eschewing the operatic crescedos of Martin Scorsese's similar The Departed a decade ago, the equally star-studded Black Mass unspools its lurid tale of crime with somber intent, though both films share the almost gleeful impact of sudden gory violence. In the end, we know the good guys ultimately won, and James "Whitey" Bulger, on the run for 12 years as an FBI Most Wanted fugitive, was captured in Santa Monica, returned to Boston, and is now serving two consecutive life sentences. Connolly, arrested and imprisoned for his part in the scandal, refused to testify against Whitey. Truer BFFs there never were.

Jupiter Ascending

JUPITER ASCENDING

** SPOILERS **

"I am never complaining about the DMV again!"

Jupiter Ascending is the sci-fi action epic for everyone who thought all the yammering about trade tariffs and bureaucracy was the best part of Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. Writer-directors The Wachowskis introduce us to their magnum opus - a universe where a bunch of intergalactic weirdos actually own all the planets in existence and Earth in particular is contested by one particular royal family of weirdos, the Abrasax. On Earth, Mila Kunis is born to an unfortunate family of Russian house cleaners living in Chicago. Kunis' name in the movie is Jupiter Jones, and Jupiter Ascending won't let us forget it for not only is the movie titled Jupiter Ascending but every character in the first half of the movie starts all their dialogue addressing her with "Jupiter..." Jupiter scrubs toilets for a living and naturally hates her life, until a bunch of aliens start attacking her, she's saved by a "gene spliced" half-human/half-wolf former space cop played by Channing Tatum (look at his pointy little ears!), and she learns she's the reincarnation of the mother of the Abrasax and thus she is the legal owner of much of the galaxy, including Earth. But only if she can get the proper legal forms and deeds of entitlements filed.  

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy would play such silliness for wry laughs but Jupiter Ascending treats it all with deadly seriousness, except for its best sequence, which would delight Hermes Conrad of Futurama: Jupiter is taken to the sprawling intergalactic central bureaucracy to full out multiple tax credit forms and jump though endless legal hoops to claim her Entitlement as a member of the Abrasax Royal Family, and thus become the legal owner of Earth. Earth is important, Jupiter is horrified to learn, because it's the key world worth "harvesting": human beings are kidnapped, killed, and turned into a special liquid that lets the rest of the beings in the universe live for thousands of years. Jupiter meets her freaky relatives, her uppity "daughter" Kalique (Tuppence Middleton), her scheming youngest "son" Titus (Douglas Booth), who tries to marry her for her title and so he can murder her and claim it, and her eldest, evilest and freakiest, Balem (Eddie Redmayne), a preening space peacock gnawing at all of the green screen scenery. Not since The Fifth Element has a sci-fi blockbuster presented us with such opulent space madness. Jupiter and the audience find themselves reeling from the endless bureaucratic and political intrigue she finds herself embroiled in. Plus every alien not "related" to her in the second half of the movie calls Jupiter "Your Majesty." No wonder she would rather spend the entire movie throwing herself at Tatum, the loyal space dog-man she has fallen in love with. 

When no one is talking about Entitlements, the Code and Conduct Guide, and filing grievances with the Royal Ways and Means Commission, Jupiter Ascending throws in a ton of loud, perfunctory action sequences, with space ships engaged in dog fights over the skies of Chicago, Tatum using his gravity boots to skate through myriad explosions, and no less than two cliffhangers involving Jupiter's finger touching the Abrasax version of an iPad and thus transferring her royal title to one of her evil "sons." We're introduced to numerous strange and exotic alien races whose names and purposes you won't remember. Sean Bean is even along for the ride as Tatum's former boss, who naturally betrays him and then teams up with him again to save the endlessly-in-peril Jupiter. It says something about the rather crappy universe the Wachowskis have dreamed up that Jupiter would rather happily go back to her life of scrubbing crap with a toilet brush and dating Tatum on the side than take her place ruling her part of the Galaxy. Mila Kunis is the first and probably only owner of the planet Earth ever who spends her days scrubbing its toilets and likes it. If there's a lesson to be learned from Jupiter Ascending, it's be nice to your house cleaners: you never know which one of them holds the Deed of Entitlement which makes them the legal owner of Earth. So tip well.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.

** SPOILERS **

"America teaming up with Russia? That doesn't sound very friendly," quips Gaby Teller (Alicia Vikander), a German mechanic who finds herself rescued from East Germany by dashing American super spy Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill)  in the opening gambit of Guy Ritchie's The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Indeed, it isn't, at least for a while. Napoleon and Teller find themselves immediately stalked by KGB operative Illya Kuraykin (Armie Hammer), who's practically the Soviet version of the Terminator, able to tear the trunk door of a car with his bare hands. Napoleon and Illya, two sides of the Cold War coin, soon find themselves on the same side, working together to prevent an Italian criminal organization from acquiring a nuclear warhead.

With The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Ritchie returns the spy genre to its sexy, stylish heyday, the glamorous 1960s. Able to cut loose from being an earnest, square jawed Man of Steel, Cavill has a ball as Napoleon Solo, a former master criminal recruited for 15 years by the CIA as their finest and, frankly, most ridiculously handsome agent. The suave, unflappable Solo, who wears a three piece bespoke suit like there's no tomorrow, has a taste for womanizing and the finer things in life, and is the polar opposite of Hammer's Illya, a stern Russian soldier accustomed to submerging his feelings and humanity at the behest of his Soviet masters.

Some of U.N.C.L.E.'s best moments involve the Cold War's best new frenemies, Napoleon and Illya, verbally jousting and taunting each other about one of their most basic similarities, that both super spies have "their balls tied by a short leash" by their respective masters. Vikander is a fetching, smoky-voiced mystery woman, keeping her cards close to her vest, but U.N.C.L.E.'s greatest scene stealer is Elizabeth Debicki as the villain of the piece. Debicki is smashing, giving us a glimpse of what it would have been like if Audrey Hepburn played a criminal mastermind ready to blackmail the world with nuclear weapons.  

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is also a curious inferno of fake accents, with Englishmen Cavill and Jared Harris sporting American accents and Hammer rasping with a Russian tongue. Though playing an East German, Vikander sports her real Swedish accent, and Hugh Grant, as the British spymaster Waverly, couldn't abandon his British accent if he tried. Enjoyable action, swaggering secret agents, gorgeous women, stunning cars, jaunts through Berlin, Rome, and the Mediterranean, and a classic elegance not seen in a spy movie since Sean Connery was 007 marks The Man from U.N.C.L.E. as sexy, frothy, engaging entertainment.

Fantastic Four (2015)

FANTASTIC FOUR

** SPOILERS **

Fantastic Four is a Negative Zone, dropping dead on arrival on movie screens. Directed by Josh Trank, who has since become estranged from 20th Century FOX and disavowed the theatrical cut, Fantastic Four is a dour monster movie about supposedly smart teenagers doing something really stupid and causing havoc to themselves and to others. The ostensible hero of Fantastic Four is the brilliant Reed Richards (Miles Teller), whom we meet as a ten year old boy genius misunderstood by his parents and outwardly despised by his teacher (Dan Castellanetta, who, like Mr. Feeney on Boy Meets World, is somehow still Richards' teacher 7 years later). Richards' greatest invention is an inter-dimensional teleporation device. Reed created a functioning one in his parents' garage when he was 10. Seven years later, he's still perfecting that exact same device and somehow believes the proper showcase for such a potentially world-altering invention is a high school science fair. 

At that very science fair, Richards is recruited by the cast of House of Cards - Dr. Franklin Storm (Reg. E. Cathey) and his adopted daughter Sue (Kate Mara) - to join the Baxter Foundation, some sort of think tank in New York City that has a virtually identical device as Reed created, but lacking the ability to bring organic matter back from the other dimension (creatively dubbed "Planet Zero"). Franklin Storm has a bunch of crazy ideas about Planet Zero possessing the answers to the mysteries of the universe and questions about the origins of our own world, as if current science already hasn't sussed much of that out. Planet Zero is a gruesome, post-apocalyptic wasteland of craggy cliffs, nightmarish lightning skies, and yeah, let's go there, that place looks awesome. Franklin Storm pairs Richards and Sue (whose special science talent is pattern recognition) with the guy who created Baxter's teleportion machine, Victor Von Doom (Toby Kebbell), a moody, angry, pouty genius whose speeches about the world deserving to die raised red flags that got him kicked out of Baxter, but Dr. Storm brings him back anyway. Completing this fantastic foursome of science is Franklin Storm's biological son Johnny (Michael B. Jordan), a fast and furious street racer who wiped out his whip and is doing his dad and sister's science-y stuff to get his ride back. 

The fantastic foursome of science get the inter-dimensional teleporter up and running, successfully sending a brave chimpanzee to Planet Zero and back. (Sue pointedly tells Reed at one point that one of her jobs is to design the environmental suits to be worn by the people going to Planet Zero to protect them, but they send the poor chimp over sans any protective wear.) When Tim Blake Nelson, one of Baxter's big wigs, witnesses the successful demonstration and decides to contact NASA so they can send qualified astronauts, Reed, Johnny, and Victor get drunk off a tiny flask of booze and decide they need to be the Neil Armstrongs of this brave new World Zero. Reed then recruits his loyal-to-a-fault best friend since childhood, Ben Grimm (Jamie Bell), to join them on this fantastic voyage, and Grimm goes along unquestioningly. The sexist jerks left Sue at home, but she's naturally alerted to the teleporter machine suddenly going online, and when the inevitable disaster on Planet Zero occurs, Victor is seemingly killed and cascades of unexplained energy come through the dimensional rift, striking Reed, Johnny, Ben, and Sue and transforming them in different, ghastly ways.

We know how this turns out: Reed can stretch, Sue can turn invisible and project force fields, Johnny can burst into flame and fly, and Ben is bombarded by alien rocks and turned into a giant orange rock monster. Now under the supervision of the US Government, Reed runs away from the secret facility they're held in, while the other three find themselves in service to the military. Ben in particular becomes a valuable operative in the field, and Johnny is next up to join him, finding their abilities weaponized. A year later, Sue locates Reed living on the run in South America, trying to scrounge the materials to build yet another teleportation device. Super genius Reed Richards only knows how to invent one thing. Reed is reacquired to join his fantastic friends, just in time to watch a military team teleport to Planet Zero and meet... Dr. Doom, who somehow survived, encased in his containment suit, sporting vaguely defined psychokinetic powers, and has become completely insane. Hey Victor, how was Planet Zero? What'd you do for that year? Oh, it doesn't matter. Victor's plan is to open a wormhole that will suck Earth into Planet Zero and destroy it. Then Victor will be the only one left, and yeah. That sounds pretty great. So the Fantastic Four combine their fantastic powers and stop him and that's that. Bizarrely, Fantastic Four ends almost identically to Avengers: Age of Ultron, with the newly minted team looking over their new headquarters and the screen cutting to black before Reed can say their new team name out loud.

Fantastic Four is a drab, lurching bore. Taking place mostly in laboratories, cramped hallways, somber, dimly-lit rooms, with the occasional field trip to a horrible alternate world of death, Fantastic Four lacks any of the joie-de-vivre of Marvel's superhero movies or even the sly wit and self-awareness of  studio-mate FOX's X-Men franchise. As Reed Richards, our leading man, Teller has all the charisma of inert Flubber. Chemistry between Teller, Mara, Jordan, and Bell is sorely lacking, be it in their interpersonal relationships (Mara and Teller, destined to be married in comic book lore, ignite as many sparks as a mouth full of Pop Rocks) or as a collective unit. As brother and sister, Mara and Jordan barely even look at each other, much less project any familial bond. Also, Mara's Sue Storm was born in Kosovo, for reasons the movie has no idea what to do with. The storied rivalry between Reed Richards and Victor Von Doom is practically nonexistent; just a quick scene of jealousy over Reed flirting with Sue and a quickie exchange over who's "smarter." The pathos of Ben Grimm, transformed into the monstrous Thing, is reduced to him moping in a dark cell in between going on black ops where he gets to smash enemy tanks. More than half the movie expires before the Fantastic Four actually gain their powers, but as per usual with this franchise, Fantastic Four drops the ball once again in imagination, rushing into the final confrontation with Dr. Doom and resolving it with uninspired action and minimal drama. As for hoping Fantastic Four ignites a reinvigorated franchise for FOX, pffft. This reboot of Fantastic Four is one and done. Back to the old drawing board. 

Hey @20thcenturyfox, just sell the #FantasticFour rights back to @Marvel. Let THEM make it. Stop embarrassing yourselves, for God's sake.

— John Orquiola (@BackoftheHead) August 7, 2015

Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - ROGUE NATION

** SPOILERS **

The Living Manifestation of Destiny

Nine years ago, I disavowed Mission: Impossible. Today, I believe in Ethan Hunt more than ever. Tom Cruise returns for his fifth Mission in 19 years as the ageless, indomitable secret agent Ethan Hunt in writer-director Christopher McQuarrie's Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, a slam-bang, globe-trotting tour de force about friendship, loyalty, and the elevation of Ethan Hunt to mythical status. Like Roger Moore's James Bond in the 1970s, Ethan Hunt is the most famous secret agent in the world, a rock star among spies. "There are stories," a fetching young female agent says to the legend himself upon meeting him. Young lady, you wouldn't believe the half of it, Hunt's wry smile seems to say. By now, Ethan Hunt simply can't be stopped, and McQuarrie's Mission smartly weaves Hunt's forehead-slapping invincibility into the narrative. This is never more apparent when one of Hunt's greatest detractors, Alec Baldwin, the new head of the CIA who seeks to dismantle the Impossible Missions Force, is forced to sing Hunt's praises to the British Prime Minister whom Hunt is about to abduct: "He's a gambler... He can become anyone. He's immune to all counter measures. He is the living manifestation of Destiny." Even 007 can't claim such laurels.

Hunt, of course, doesn't quite see himself as others see him. Or if he does, he's simply too modest to say. There are times when it seems like he forces himself to be the superhero everyone believes him to be, in spite of himself. Once again, Ethan is reunited with his IMF besties, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, and Jeremy Renner, all of whom he gave Ethan's Special IMF Besties iPhones to at the conclusion of the previous Mission, Ghost Protocol. (Paula Patton, who received the fourth Bestie iPhone, is never mentioned.) All three of Ethan's besties spend much of Rogue Nation debating Ethan's motives and even his sanity at times - Ethan has never quite been so obsessed and occasionally unhinged as he is in Rogue Nation - but one thing they never question is Ethan's ability. Ethan can do anything; Pegg is so certain of it he doesn't for a moment believe Ethan can't hold his breath for over three minutes to perform an "impossible" mission inside a water tank. "Difficult, yeah, but not impossible." Ethan's closest allies see him as an action figure that can weather any abuse, to Ethan's chagrin. But he still does it all unquestioningly. After nearly drowning and being resuscitated, Ethan is never quite as endearing as he is all punch drunk but still not hesitating for a second to engage in a car chase and motorcycle chase. Unlike Bond or Jason Bourne, who primarily work solo, Ethan is reliant on his team, and looks out for them. When he recruits Pegg into his schemes and tries to give him an out after things go FUBAR, Pegg rejects the very idea of abandoning Ethan on the sole basis of his unwavering friendship. Ethan is genuinely touched. 

In Rogue Nation, Ethan and the IMF are once more disavowed and on the hunt (pun unintended) for the Syndicate, which was introduced in the closing seconds of Ghost Protocol. The Syndicate, led by thin-lipped British mastermind Solomon Lane (Sean Harris), are a covert black ops terrorist organization, "a rogue nation, an anti-IMF." (We get it. Easy on the sell job, fellas.)  The CIA believes the Syndicate are a figment of Ethan's imagination, but the IMF know better, because the IMF always knows better. Rogue Nation weaves in recent tragedies like missing Malaysian flights and nuclear meltdowns and lays the blame squarely at the feet of the Syndicate. They're always one step ahead of Ethan Hunt, which drives Ethan as crazy as we've ever seen him. A direct sequel to Ghost Protocol referencing the nuclear missile attack on San Francisco the IMF foiled, Rogue Nation also pleasantly calls back to previous Missions, with a blatant flaunting of a rabbit's foot and Baldwin referring to Ethan's theft of the NOC list in the original Mission as occurring in his first year in the CIA. Rogue Nation also introduces the most formidable and intriguing female character in franchise history, Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), a show-stealing, ass-kicking disavowed British Secret Service agent who alternates from Syndicate operative to Ethan's ally. There's never really a question who's side she's ultimately on, and it takes a tremendous contortion of logic why the Syndicate never kills her considering how consistently she betrays them in favor of Ethan, but Ferguson is magnetic, more than a match for Ethan Hunt.

McQuarrie delivers the awesome international spectacle Mission: Impossible demands, from a bravura opening airplane heist in Belarus, with Cruise seemingly hanging onto the outside of a cargo plane taking off by his fingertips, a virtuoso, acrobatic action set piece involving three assassins in an opera in Vienna, to a relentless, next-level motorcycle chase in Casablanca outdoing the tremendous car chase in McQuarrie and Cruise's previous collaboration, Jack Reacher. Surprisingly, instead of upping the ante by going balls-out in the London-based third act, McQuarrie takes the opposite tack, going smaller and making the resolution of Rogue Nation about the characters and the personal vendetta between Ethan Hunt and Solomon Lane, literally concluding in a glass box. Ethan doesn't even climb and jump off of any ridiculously tall buildings in this movie! On the line isn't so much the fate of the world as the fates of Pegg, Ethan's best friend, and Ferguson, a woman caught in an impossible situation. More than anything, loyalty and friendship drives Ethan Hunt in Rogue Nation. When it comes to his friends, Ethan Hunt admirably proves nothing is impossible.

Southpaw

SOUTHPAW

** SPOILERS **

"The Great White Dope" reads a headline about Billy Hope (Jake Gyllenhaal), the former Light Heavyweight Champion of the World, who lost his fortune, his career, and the care of his young daughter when his wife (Rachel McAdams) was (accidentally?) murdered. That headline is on point. Southpaw is a grizzled rehash of the first five Rocky movies, centering around Gyllenhaal's fighter, a Hell's Kitchen, NY-born orphan who came up through the system and became a world champion, despite his general lack of intelligence and crippling anger management issues. Billy Hope even fights like Rocky Balboa, leading with his face until he gets mad and knocks out his opponents in the late rounds of his fights. In an incident similar to how Mr. T provoked the death of Mickey in Rocky III, a cocky challenger insults Gyllenhaal's manhood and implies carnal relations with his wife. In the ensuing melee that involves of both of their entourages, a gun goes off and McAdams is shot to death. Stricken with grief and wholly unprepared to meet his parental and financial obligations, Gyllenhaal behaves erratically and violently until child services interferes, taking custody of his daughter while Gyllenhaal loses all of his worldly possessions to auction. It couldn't have happened to a dumber guy.

The main thrust of Southpaw is Gyllenhaal's fumbling attempts to regain custody of his daughter who (rightly) blames him for the death of her mother. Going back to basics, Gyllenhaal gets a custodial job at a low rent gym owned by Forest Whitaker, who only trains amateur fighters, mainly disadvantaged kids, to keep them off the streets. Against his better judgment, Whitaker agrees to train Gyllenhaal for an eventual comeback, teaching him the revolutionary art of defense, i.e. not spending ten rounds getting punched in the face. Of course, the big redemption fight happens, thanks to fight promoter 50 Cent, playing a low key version of Don King. The movie can't decide if he's a villain or not. The movie doesn't even decide how Gyllenhaal lost his fortune; the script is unsure whether Gyllenhaal's accountant stole all his money. If the script doesn't know, then we certainly don't know. Speaking of the script, all conversation between Gyllenhaal and his family ends with them calling each other "baby," as if Final Draft just kept adding "baby" at the end of all the dialogue and the writer was too lazy to delete it, baby. Southpaw also seems to feel all the philosophical conversations about boxing between Rocky, Mickey, and Apollo Creed were too eloquent, because Southpaw careens in the opposite direction. When Whitaker tries to explain his boxing philosophy and life lessons to Gyllenhaal, "incoherent" doesn't quite cover it.

To his credit, Gyllenhaal physically transforms into a credible fighter, and he holds Southpaw together by sheer force of his talent, even as the movie stumbles around him like a punch drunk fighter on the ropes. Whitaker also does interesting stuff with his mentor character, trying to find and convey a depth that's lacking on the page. The most interesting moments of Southpaw are Gyllenhaal's fleeting relationship with a young black kid at the gym; their few scenes together are more compelling than all of Gyllenhaal's attempts to reconnect with his daughter. Director Antoine Fuqua brings his A-game to the fight scenes, which are as visceral, bloody, and rousing as boxing movies get. Southpaw wants us to believe, among other things, that light heavyweight boxing is the hottest ticket in sports, and that Gyllenhaal can lose his title, his wife, his fortune, his daughter, go into poverty, and mount a comeback where he regains his championship and his family in the span of a few weeks. It sure was a tough financial quarter for Billy "The Great" Hope, but he came through it all right. Until the next time he loses his shit and loses everything as a result, baby.