‘Southpaw’ TV Spot: A Jacked Jake Gyllenhaal Gets Wrecked

More like Jacked Gyllenhaal, am I right? One of the summer releases that isn’t getting a lot of attention just yet is Antoine Fuqua’s Southpaw, starring a totally ripped Jake Gyllenhaal as a distraught boxer punishing himself in the ring following a horrible tragedy — oh, the trailer doesn’t hide it, so why should we: his wife dies in an accident, leaving him to raise his daughter alone.

There is some concern over Southpaw, and while Fuqua’s direction seems to capture the intensity of both Gyllenhaal’s personal torment and his brutal fights in the ring, the trailer and this new TV spot haven’t exactly been hiding anything. It’s become commonplace for trailers to act as the Cliff’s Notes for movies, spelling every plot and emotional beat out for you to the point where it’s like, why even bother?

But Gyllenhaal was one of the best — if not the best — actors last year, delivering impeccable performances in Nightcrawler and Enemy, following his fantastic part in Prisoners the year before. If anything has me sold on Southpaw, it’s the promise of another amazing Gyllenhaal performance.

Southpaw comes from writer Kurt Sutter, known best as the showrunner of Sons of Anarchy — another part of Southpaw that’s making a lot of people feel skeptical given his writing inconsistencies.

The film arrives in theaters on July 24.