10 Actors Who Drew Critical Acclaim In Awful Movies
3. Jake Gyllenhaal As Billy Hope – Southpaw
2015 was a year that saw the reemergence of the boxing movie.
Creed breathed new life into the aging Rocky franchise, but only after the summer release of Southpaw, a sports drama starring Jake Gyllenhaal that had spent years stuck in development hell.
Gyllenhaal underwent an incredible transformation for the part, spending five months training twice a day to achieve the required physique and skillset to convincingly portray a light-heavyweight champion boxer.
The movie was a predictable boxing comeback story, and contained each and every trope that you'd expect from a sports drama.
Despite the uninspired nature of the movie, Gyllenhaal proved yet again why he is such a bankable star: he delivers an emotional, brutal and touching performance which stands out as easily the most remarkable thing in an otherwise generic boxing movie.
While Gyllenhaal undeniably saved Southpaw from a universal panning, he couldn't completely make up for its shortcomings, and it was quickly forgotten alongside the revival of the Rocky franchise, but his performance as Billy "The Great" Hope is something that deserves far more praise than it ever received.