This was definitely one of the better movies of the summer.
I mean we all knew what was going to happen at the end of the movie, yes it was cliche and it didn't do anything new in terms of storytelling, but the performances of everyone in this movie made it that much better. Right from the beginning of the movie you knew that Billy Hope (Jake Gyllenhaal) was a devoted family man who lived only to provide the life that he and his wife M (Rachel McAdams) never had growing up.
It's the typical boxer movie, he has everything, then loses everything, then gets everything back. It's the performance of Gyllenhaal that cements this movie for me. The points where he showed the spirit of a man who was a devoted husband and father and subsequent fall from grace when the one thing that he loved the most was taken from him in this world, his wife. Once he hit rock bottom and his daughter was put into the same system that he fought so hard to keep her out of he decided to turn his life around.
Forest Whitaker came in at the right time with the right background story that served it's purpose well. He took in a beaten down Billy and made him, (through great reluctance at first), back into the boxer he once was with a little surprise. The whole movie was just a heart wrenching moment where you couldn't stop feeling his pain of his wife dying due to his bone head anger and subsequently losing his daughter. I know I've said that a couple of times but that's what the movie is about, family.
I definitely enjoyed this movie from the get go and it built nicely on the character development aspect of things. It wasn't anything out of the ordinary but like I said before, the actors put this movie on their back and made it into something special. I thoroughly enjoyed this and would definitely recommend it to someone to watch. I've always said that if a movie can make you have an emotional investment in it's characters, then it did it's job.
Have you seen this movie? If so leave it in the comments below.
Until next time guys!
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