CREED

(Ryan Coogler, 2015)

The confidence and assurance Coogler demonstrates in the leap from his debut, Fruitvale Station, a small-scale independent film, to Creed, a big studio boxing drama and a reboot-sequel to the Rocky series, is truly startling. And not only is he confident; he is successful - this is a superb piece of studio film-making, made with wit and style, engrossing, exciting and affecting throughout.
The story follows Adonis "Donny" Thompson (Michael B Jordan, showing the movie star chops needed to carry a whole film on his shoulders), illegitimate son of Apollo Creed, as he gives up his white collar world in Los Angeles and travels to Philadelphia, where he convinces his father's old friend Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) to help train him. Donny must battle his old demons - of course, this is a boxing movie - while Rocky deals with his. Along the way, too, there are a couple of epic boxing matches.
The only real issue Creed has is pacing; at just over two hours it is a little overlong, and it feels as if the whole movie restarts after Donny's first real fight, when Rocky confronts his own problems. Aside from that, it is a beautifully crafted example of the boxing genre. Donny is an interesting character, fighting because he feels he needs to, and his relationship with Rocky is touching - mutual surrogacy which is finally acknowledged, and needed by both men. He also has a sweet romance with Biancha (Tessa Thompson), a singer whose progressive hearing loss gives her character a never-overplayed thematic resonance for Donny, with his issues with making his mark while he has time, and Rocky's obsession with the past and future.
While cramming in two lead storylines - one for Donny and one for Rocky - creates some of those pacing issues, it also allows Stallone to shade this portrayal of his oldest character with some lovely notes of melancholy and regret. This is probably his best acting work, and he retains that old movie star presence, now deepened by age and sadness, which gives this film a nice depth of flavour.
But it stands and falls as a boxing movie, and what is so exceptional is the way it embraces each and every boxing movie cliche (most of them pumped up by Stallone in the Rocky series) and yet transcends them. There are training montages, of course. Donny screws up and comes perilously close to losing everyone he loves. There is a run through the streets of Philadelphia.
But Coogler is an exciting talent, and he knows the power of a moving camera and comes up with some interesting angles on familiar material. He shoots Donny's first big fight in one extended shot, lending it the elegance and power of a great dance sequence in a musical. Whenever a possible opponent for Donny appears on-screen, his career stats appear beside him, like something from a computer game. That Philadelphia run is mainly in slo-mo, with motorbikes racing around Donny as he sprints. Donny and Biancha first connect in an upside-down shot, lying on her floor, listening to her music. The way the dialogue drops away as the referee addresses Rocky and Donny in the dressing room, and all we can hear is the crowd above.
Donny's sudden and panicked need to go use the toilet before his first fight is typical of this film - slight twists on familiar material, freshening it up. The climactic bout is shot in a more modern style, lot of movement and impact cuts, but it is done about as well as it can be done, and it follows the emotional arc familiar from this series to exhilarating effect.
All of this and the clear-eyed way it regards issues of ageing and legacy make this an unusually intelligent studio franchise film, and one that is almost entirely successful.

SOUTHPAW

(Antoine Fuqua, 2015)

There is a certain level of automatic audience identification and interest generated by a story about a parent trying to get back their child. There is a similar level of automatic audience identification and interest generated by an underdog boxing story, following a fighter who loses everything and sets out on a road to redemption.
In its third act, Southpaw benefits from a confluence of both of these story types, and rides a mix of action and emotion to a stirring finale. With this kind of material, only bad filmmaking and awful acting can really prevent a movie from working to a certain extent, and Fuqua's best work here is in the boxing sequences, guaranteeing a level of tension as the climax approaches and the stakes are set as man against man. But the film has gotten to this point almost despite itself. Written by Kurt Sutter, the story is hilariously generic. Billy Hope (Jake Gyllenhal) is a World Champion Boxer, married to his childhood sweetheart Maureen (Rachel McAdams). Having met in the care system, they do their best to provide a loving environment for their daughter Leila. Billy's fighting style rests on taking a lot of punishment, and using his anger to power his own efforts. Maureen acts as his manager, and she doesn't see a future in such an approach. But a scuffle with the entourage of a title contender leads to a tragic accident, and a newly widowed Billy goes to pieces and loses everything, including his livelihood and Leila. Halfway through the film then, he approaches Tig Wells (Forest Whitaker), who trained the only man Billy regards as having outfought him, and asks him to train Billy in another way.
This all means that the film is split between two basic movements; the tawdry melodrama of Billy trying to put his life back together so that he is worthy of Leila's love, and the overly familiar stuff with Billy adapting his fighting style and disciplining himself so that he can become a far more effective boxer. The melodrama is marked by a collection of "intense" performances led by Gyllenhal as Billy. He emotes furiously and is convincing as a boxer - all tattoos and sweat and blood and muscles - but all the emoting and intensity never really adds up to a convincing or interesting character. McAdams is much better in her scenes as a warmly realist Maureen, as is Whitaker as wise old Tig. The boxing stuff is interestingly detailed, allows for a training montage or two, and yet makes for a curiously undramatic climax, since Billy has learned to fight with patience and caution rather than the blood and thunder of his old style. That all means that while Southpaw just about works, it is too generic, too forgettable and too familiar to be all that good.

REAL STEEL

(Shawn Levy, 2011)

Take Rocky, add a little sprinkling of The Champ, and then; add robots.
That sounds truly awful, I know. But Real Steel works on it's own, oh-so simple terms. Based on a Richard Matheson story - always a good thing - it is set a few years in the future, when boxing has been replaced by robot boxing, allowing for far more violence and carnage in the ring as machines pound and rend one another into scrap metal. Charlie Kenton (Hugh Jackman) is an ex-contender, now plugging his way from one debt and one robot to another, never catching a break, living off the goodwill of his ex (Evangeline Lily). Then his 11-year old son (Dakota Goyo) shows up, and Charlie does a deal with the husband of the boy's Aunt - he will spend a summer with Charlie, who will then give him up and be rewarded with a $50,000 payday. All Charlie cares about is the money.
But the boy loves robot Boxing as much as he does, and they bond over the potential of Atom, an old, battered sparring bot they find one night in the scrapyard.
Atom is built to take punishment, and with the modifications made by the boy and Charlie's knowhow, he starts to win fights and develop a reputation. All the while, father and son are growing closer as they drive back and forth across the country, and Charlie's bad luck seems to be changing. Then there is the seemingly invincible super-bot Zeus on the horizon, built to spot patterns and counter them, but perhaps not quite so comfortable against human spontaneity and creativity.
There is nothing new here; not a scene or character or idea or emotion or gag. But what there is, is effectively done. The fight scenes are exciting, nicely manipulative, and well-shot. The gushing sentiment of the father-son scenes is affecting. This sort of underdog tale cannot miss unless it's done really badly, and this one is not.
As robot boxing movies go, in fact, I imagine you can't do any better...

WARRIOR

(Gavin O'Connor, 2011)

There's a certain strain of boxing movie that works by depicting the underdog struggles of a protagonist, repeatedly striking him down, one piece of bad luck after another, his personal life just a series of problems until boxing is all he has left, the only pure thing and the only possible source of redemption available to him. The kind of movie that works by making us sympathise with its hero so much that we are desperate for him to win that last fight, until the tension is unbearable and only a euphoric moment of victory will break it. The Rocky films are the pumped up cartoon versions of this archetype, and Gavin O'Connor's Warrior is a film fully aware of the power of all those cliches and determined to push them as far as possible.
It follows not one but two MMA fighters, estranged brothers, each with his own hard luck story and reason for fighting, both haunted by childhoods scarred by their alcoholic father, as their destinies lead them towards an inevitable showdown in a massive Atlantic City "Single Elimination" Cage-Fighting tournament.
Three things elevate Warrior. O'Connor made one of the better Sports movies of the last decade with the winning 2004 Kurt Russell vehicle Miracle, and he has an obvious understanding of the emotional dynamics of this sort of material. The backdrop to the MMA material here is a world in the grip of an economic depression, with financial ruin - the words "foreclosure" and "bankruptcy" are mentioned at a bank, while people work two jobs and a couple argue about spending - the engine driving one fighter onwards. This world feels recognisable and intimate, and it gives Warrior much of its sting. The rest comes from the cast. The central trio of alpha males are all terrific in different ways. Hardy lets that quicksilver charisma flow, and his character, wounded and full of rage and violence, is probably the best in the film, his arc the most compelling. Edgerton is the family man, fighting a losing battle with debt and unsure of his own skills in the cage, but willing to take any punishment in order to win. His sad-eyed looks are perfect for the part. Nolte is as good as ever as their father, and he has a couple of astonishing moments of emotional breakdown which almost feel too raw here.
All these elements combine to make this a film filled with emotion; gritty and suffering, its climactic sequence, when the brothers meet in the cage, is an astonishingly moving fight sequence, echoing the ferocity of a couple of earlier emotional showdowns between these characters. And while it's undoubtedly utterly contrived and horribly manipulative, Warrior works brilliantly. The MMA sequences are intense, exciting and visceral, and each of them has some emotional resonance and narrative importance. O'Connor doesnt waste a second, aware that he needs all the time he can get if he's going to make us cry.

CINDERELLA MAN

(Ron Howard, 2005)

Ron Howard is less a bland filmmaker - a frequent accusation - and more an incredibly old-fashioned one. He seems like a stock contract director who worked for Fox in the 1950s across a variety of genres, turning out comedies and Westerns and thrillers, none of them brilliant, none of them terrible (setting aside the aberrative Dan Brown adaptations, which even Hitchcock couldn't have saved), none of them evincing much particular directorial personality or style. Hes a Pro, in other words. And Cinderella Man may be his most purely old-fashioned film, with its triumph of the spirit, its cookie-cutter three act structure, its mean villain and it's big stars in the leads. Based on the incredible story of Jim Braddock and his rise from poverty to World Champion during the Great Depression, it is incredibly manipulative and, dammit, it works. There are good things: Russell Crowe is convincing both as last-chance fighter and desperate family man, Paul Giamatti is brilliant - moving, hilarious - as his trainer, Salvatore Totino's cinematography is lovely, and the fight scenes steal from more or less every boxing film ever made to solid, occasionally stylish effect. Less impressive are the vague shapes towards poliical meaning the film throws, personified by Paddy Considine's ill-conceived Union agitator. Indeed the entire storyline involving Considine could be excised and the film would benefit. But it does what it intends to do nevertheless - by the climax, you want Crowe to win that fight, you need Crowe to win that fight. A vivid expression of the power of the sports movie and a handsome, well-crafted piece of old fashioned entertainment.

THE FIGHTER

(David O. Russell, 2010)

The Fighter indulges in every boxing movie cliche imaginable. Here is a working class young man from a troubled background in an unfashionable part of America, taking beating after beating, his career and life seemingly going nowhere. And here is his sudden rise, buoyed by the love of a good, formidable woman, ending in a final shot at glory. Best of all, it's based on a true story. But David O. Russell really isn't interested in boxing cliches. Instead his focus is on the troubled, working class background. The young mans brother, a former golden boy contender turned chatterbox crack addict, is just as central to this film as the boxer himself, and his terrifying hydra of sisters and peroxide blonde mother are it's antagonists more than any of his opponents are.
But then Russell is clever. Understanding the cheap potency of those boxing cliches, he delivers them anyway, and they are as powerful and satisfying as ever, perhaps even moreso, because his choices are interesting. Reflecting the period in which the film is set, he shoots much of these sequences on cheap video - or at least film treated to look like video - and always includes the comentators on the soundtrack. Such fidelity to the unwritten rules of cinematic portrayals of pugilism is echoed in his cross-cutting between the ring and the reactions of spectators and the way the momentum and advantage swings between the fighters. He even throws in montages and distorts the soundtrack during slow motion instants. The film ends on a triumphant freezeframe, an almost self-parodic moment. Then Russell undercuts and denies the cliches at every turn. His characters are complex and difficult and the pain and awkwardness of their relationships is never downplayed. The big lesson he seems to have learned from Scorsese's Raging Bull is that the fights can be a relief from the emotional and psychic violence of interpersonal relationships, that the straightforward physical contest seems pure and almost wholesome by comparison.
Russell has always worked well with actors and here Christian Bale - as the crackhead brother - and Melissa Leo - as the peroxide blonde mother- are the real standouts, especially powerful in a couple of fierce scenes together, while Mark Wahlberg is all quiet, hurt dignity as the title character.
What separates the film from a legion of superficially similar boxing biopics is the energy it crackles with, there in Russell's mobile, live wire camera, the selection of classic rock and pop on the soundtrack, the intimate capture of a real community in Lowell, and in Bale's itchy bodypop of a performance.
All this and it works pretty much as well as Rocky, as feel good boxing films go.