Creed received enough acclaim that I thought I’d check it out, though I probably wouldn’t have done so if not for the fact that, moderate spoilers
  throughout when I was a kid, my brothers and I had two videotapes that we watched so often that we practically wore them out: one was Pee‑Wee’s Big Adventure, and the other was Rocky IV.  And so reaching Creed on the Skandies list seemed like a good opportunity to revisit the Rocky series, which despite my loathing of boxing was a touchstone of my youth.

Sylvester Stallone and John Avildsen, 1976

AMPAS Best Picture

Despite having watched Rocky IV countless times, I’d never actually seen the original.  It is barely part of the same genre.  In IV, Rocky Balboa is a superhero, America’s exemplar of ultimate physical perfection.  In this first film, he is not, as I had thought, a young up-and-comer from the wrong side of the tracks who works his way to an unlikely title shot through hard work and determination.  He’s an unskilled palooka who at age thirty is fighting other nobodies in smoky backstreet gyms for a winner’s share of forty bucks.  That doesn’t pay the rent even for his little rat’s nest of an apartment, so he makes up the rest working as a leg-breaker for a local mobster⁠—not even a boss, but middle management.  When he gets his title shot, it’s because the champ, Apollo Creed⁠—modeled on real-life heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali⁠—has already heavily promoted a fight against a real contender in Philadelphia, and when that contender drops out due to injury, Creed decides that, with no others willing to step in with only five weeks to prepare, the only way to maintain interest in the event is through “novelty”: he’ll take on a local ham-and-egger, preferably a “snow white” one, and play on the country’s sentiment for an underdog (and racial animus).  He basically picks Rocky out of the phone book.

I knew (from having watched Rocky II) how this one ends: though Creed retains the belt, Rocky wins a moral victory just by surviving fifteen rounds, and in fact it is Creed who has appar­ently been saved by the bell, winning on points in a split decision even though Rocky is clearly in control at the end.  What I did not know, or at least did not appreciate as a kid, is that this is actu­ally the culmination of a romance plot.  Rocky is largely about Rocky’s courtship of his future wife, Adrian.  He is a dumb, mum­bling motormouth, and she is a spinster in granny glasses, so withdrawn and socially awkward that the mob boss’s driver calls her a “retard”, but their flaws are framed as complementary⁠—Rocky says that they fill each other’s gaps.  When he achieves his goal of “going the distance” with Creed, Rocky ignores the reporters and the announcement of the outcome, bellowing “ADRIAN!!” until she makes her way to the ring and embraces him with cries of “I love you, I love you!”  But this is kind of a head-scratcher, because this was not actually in doubt.  The moment when Rocky had won her over had come over an hour of screen time earlier, in a scene that may not have raised eyebrows in 1976 but is actually pretty horrifying today: Adrian says she’s uncomfortable in Rocky’s apartment and tries to leave, but he blocks the door, looms over the tiny woman, and forces kisses upon her until she decides she likes it.  By the time of the title bout, she’s already moved in with him and has reassured him that he doesn’t need to prove himself to her.  So I don’t get why the filmmakers would end the film by reiterating facts already in evidence.

Another surprise: I knew (or thought I knew) that Apollo Creed was the big villain of the first two Rocky films, before doing a face turn for III and coaching Rocky back to the top.  But even in the first film, he’s actually pretty likeable!  Yeah, he’s a self-promoter and a showboat, but in a good-natured way.  He’s also basically the one intelligent character in a movie full of dummies⁠—as a kid I had not realized the extent to which the entire series is a comedy about Rocky’s stupidity⁠—and so Apollo’s scenes came to feel like coming up for air.  His look of exhausted disbelief when Rocky gets up in the 14th round was my favorite shot in the entire series.  (On the flip side, gah, Paulie is absolutely every bit as loathsome as I remembered.  Rocky is a good-natured dummy; Paulie is a vile idiot.)

Sylvester Stallone, 1979

I had seen this one before; in fact, my brother had the Rocky II soundtrack on cassette, and I used to listen to it while working on OCAD prep in the Troy High School library back in the summer of ’87.  But even though I had watched the culminating fight any number of times, I think I may have only watched it from start to finish once or twice.  The story here is that while Apollo Creed has won his fight against Rocky on paper, much of the public believes that Rocky was the rightful winner, and Creed starts clamoring for a rematch.  However, doctors warn Rocky that, after the injuries he suffered in the first fight, his vision could be at risk if he fights again, and he promises Adrian, now pregnant, that he’ll retire.  Thus begins one of the worst stock plots in the business: the Wet Blanket Girlfriend, or in this case, Wife.  Rocky blows through the $150,000 he made in the Creed fight buying a house, a sports car, jewelry for Adrian, a jacket with a tiger on the back for himself, a fancy collar for his dog… and while he initially has some commercials lined up, they dry up when it turns out that he can barely read and therefore botches take after take struggling with the cue cards.  His attempt to get white-collar work flops due to his ninth-grade education, and when he gets a job at the meat-packing plant, he soon loses it due to the wintry economic climate of the 1970s.  Accepting the rematch would solve all his problems, except, dagnabbit, there’s Adrian the shrew standing in the way, just because he promised her that he wouldn’t risk being blinded or worse.  “I never asked you to stop being a woman,” Rocky grumbles, “don’t ask me to stop being a man!”  Because, you know, being a man requires that you trade face punches with other men until you all end up in the hospital.  Speaking of which: the badgering of vile idiot Paulie sends Adrian into premature labor and thence into a coma, and Rocky is sufficiently attentive during her convalescence that she changes her mind.  The rest of the film is basically a repeat of the first.  Same training sequence set to the same music, except this time dozens of schoolchildren run along with Rocky as he bounds up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  Same fight, with one twist: because it is pretty much the exact same fight, Creed finds himself heading into the last round in the exact same position that drove him to arrange the rematch in the first place, winning on points but unable to put Rocky away.  So this time he disregards his trainer’s advice and leaves himself vulnerable trying to knock Rocky out rather than coasting to a victory.  And so this time Rocky wins.  Because the ’80s were on the horizon, and they spelled the end of any kind of tolerance for interesting ambiguity.

(Also, because I hadn’t seen the first film, when I was a kid I didn’t realize that all those times Rocky II cuts to a loudly cheer­ing fan with tinted glasses and a mustache… that’s a mobster!  The whole series is weirdly non-judgmental about that guy.)

Sylvester Stallone, 1982

It is striking what a difference a change of decade makes.  In the first Rocky film, it’s hard to draw a line between Rocky and the 1970s urban squalor of which he is a product.  Though curiously deserted, the crumbling brick and concrete warrens of Philadel­phia, scored alternately to disco and what sound like outtakes from the background music of Taxi Driver, are more than just a backdrop⁠—to a great extent they are the substance of the film.  Cut to Rocky III, and all that’s gone.  Rocky lives in a mansion and ends up training in L.A., the long runs through junkyards and street markets replaced by sprints on sunny Pacific beaches.  And Rocky himself is no longer just a strong guy in good shape: he now looks like a freakish ’roid case, cut like a bodybuilder, with veins popping and skin glistening with body oil.  His antagonists are played by Hulk Hogan and Mr. T.  It would be hard to get more early‑’80s without having him fight Pac‑Man.  (Actually, we do see an arcade; it has a copy of Star Castle, an obscure game best known for inspiring Yars’ Revenge.)

Much as Rocky II recycled Rocky, III recycles II; once again we see Rocky cashing in on his popularity, though this time his endorsement deals work out.  Once again he loses his peak fighting form (in II because he’s retired, in III because his trainer Mickey schedules his title defenses against has-beens and never-weres).  Once again he is distracted by a medical emergency befalling a loved one (Adrian in II, Mickey in III).  Once again he is hindered by fear (of losing his eyesight in II, of the savagery of Clubber Lang in III).  And once again he is sparked into training with renewed purpose, this time by Adrian yelling at him.  This time the idea is that Apollo Creed teaches Rocky how to be a real boxer rather than just a puncher with a strong jaw, allowing him to beat Lang on skill, but ultimately the secret to victory is to recapture “the eye of the tiger”, as it is put in the song for which this movie serves as a long music video.  And… why is that a good thing?  Apollo takes Rocky to a gym in L.A.’s Skid Row, shows him all the aspiring fighters desperately looking for a path out of grinding poverty, and explains that it is their hunger that makes them winners and Rocky’s lack of that hunger that has turned him into a loser.  That is, with the film’s endorsement, he tries to make a pathology out of being content.  The message of Rocky III is that to say, “Hey, you know what, I think I’ve got enough!” is inexcusable weakness⁠—a winner is always after more, more, more.  “Eye of the tiger.”  I don’t want to live in a society full of predators.

Sylvester Stallone, 1985
director’s cut: Sylvester Stallone, 2021

Originally I was going to say that all I had to say about this movie I put into my IF game Endless, Nameless, which has the entire movie embedded within it as a long switch statement, but by a crazy coincidence, while I was working on this article Sylvester Stallone released a director’s cut of Rocky IV, 36 years after it first hit the theaters.  So I watched that and, oof, it’s bad.  It’s paced like a boulder bouncing down a mountainside, with a lot of second-best takes included seemingly just for the sake of changing things up, and a lot of spliced-out lines making for some choppy sequences.  It’s still pretty much Rocky as made for MTV, a long string of music videos pasted together.  Gorbachev is no longer won over by Rocky’s stirring speech at the end, we see a scene of the U.S. boxing commission refusing to sanction Rocky’s match against Drago (even though the newspaper page we see takes care of this perfectly well), and the robot is gone⁠—actually, it’s hard to escape the feeling that Stallone did this because he was just that embarrassed by the robot.  Perhaps worst of all, Rocky repeats his “I never asked you to stop being a woman” speech.  I will stick with the Betamax version.

Sylvester Stallone and John Avildsen, 1990

I saw this once, shortly after it came out on VHS.  (Our Betamax player was long gone by this point.)  I remembered virtually nothing about it.  The story is that vile idiot Paulie has assigned power of attorney over Rocky’s finances to a corrupt accountant who has lost everything.  Rocky can’t rebuild his finances by taking on a few more fights because he’s been forced to retire due to brain damage suffered in the Drago fight.  So it’s back to the old neighborhood for Rocky.  Nothing particularly interesting follows.  A Don King stand-in tries to lure Rocky back into the ring.  Adrian protests.  Rocky gets into coaching.  He takes on a protégé who quickly racks up a lot of wins.  Rocky’s son feels ignored.  Don King gets his hooks into the protégé.  Various faces get punched.  What is interesting, at least to me, is how Rocky V reflects a culture-wide step back from the excesses of the ’80s.  The Rocky of IV was collecting Lamborghinis, giving away robots as birthday presents, and joining up with G.I. Joe.  It’s like the filmmakers made some bad decisions in a Choose Your Own Adventure book, wound up somewhere ridiculous, and decided to backtrack⁠—all the way back to the ’70s, only this time with rap music instead of disco.

Rocky V has a lot of newspapers in it.  I guess the filmmakers thought that the video versions would be too blurry to read if anyone out there decided to try hitting the pause button, but we have 1080p now.  And, uh.  In a lot of places they just took a real page from the Los Angeles Times and replaced the main headline, so that under a story titled “Balboa Estate Auction” would be a paragraph beginning, “Because those gasolines cost more…”  But then in other places they pasted in some, uh, different stuff.  Headline: “Balboa’s Clone Clobbers Opponent”.  Story: “That person was mean and nasty and told the car mean, maen things about the other owner. So then the car who had loved the young lady all it’s life suddenly said no more. The lady was heart broken not to be able to see her beloved car anymore. So to very day she still has no other car she will love more.”  Well okay then!

Sylvester Stallone, 2006

I never got around to watching this one, though I’d heard when it came out that it was far better than the other sequels.  It’s not.  I was expecting a character study, partly because of the word of mouth, and partly because what else could it be?  A boxing movie?  Rocky was already old enough in the first film that the traditional window to be a contender had passed him by; II had him coming out of retirement; III had him fighting to prove he wasn’t washed up; by V he had moved into training younger fighters.  And, chronologically, V was closer to the original film than to this.  So here we find Rocky, on the verge of turning sixty, living in the past, with a small house in the old neighborhood, running a restaurant (bringing this impressively close to the plot Weird Al Yankovic predicted for Rocky XIII) where he ambles from table to table telling stories of his glory days.  Adrian is years dead, and while Rocky reconnects with Little Marie from the first film, he makes it clear that this connection will be purely platonic: as the many, many pictures of Adrian around his house attest, he is still no more over Adrian Balboa than Adrian Monk is over Trudy.  Fair enough, if a bit one-note.  And then… we get virtually a complete repeat of the first movie, as Rocky returns to the ring (!) and gets a match against the heavyweight champ (!!), going the distance and losing in a split decision (!!!).  Apparently the filmmakers thought that this preposterous turn of events would be rescued by the fact that George Foreman had shocked the world by winning the heavyweight title back at age 45, or by the fact that Bernard Hopkins fought at an elite level into his late forties.  But, again, in order to match the ages, “Rocky pulls a George Foreman” would have had to be the plot to Rocky *V*⁠—not the sixth installment sixteen years later.  So this is both repetitive and silly.

One thing I did like was that Rocky Balboa acknowledged that boxing’s place in the world had changed significantly even since the previous film in the series.  V came out the year that Buster Douglas pulled off a stunning upset of Mike Tyson, which was huge news at the time.  The Tyson–Holyfield fights were also pretty big events.  But they weren’t nearly as big as fights were in the eras of Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Muham­mad Ali, or Soda Popinski, and by the time the 21st century rolled around, boxing’s standing even just within the world of sports had dropped to about the level of that other top sport of the early 20th century: horse racing.  So it was nice to see “nobody’s watching boxing anymore” appear as a plot point in Rocky Balboa⁠—it made the movie feel less like a missive from an alternate universe.

Sylvester Stallone, Aaron Covington, and Ryan Coogler, 2015

#42, 2015 Skandies

Again, not what I expected.  I figured that, with the change of name, this was going to be its own thing, set in the Rocky universe for the sake of branding, with maybe a cameo here and there by some of the original cast.  But no, it’s pretty much Rocky VII.  Rocky is no longer the lead character, but he’s more #1A than #2.  All the more so because the lead character, the son of Apollo Creed, doesn’t really land.  He comes from poverty (offspring of an affair, orphaned, in and out of juvenile hall), but he also comes from privilege (adopted by Creed’s widow).  He’s “square”, but he’s “street”.  He wants to make his own name, but he wants to do honor to his father’s legacy.  Putting aside his ambiguous background and motivation, he has no real presence or personality to speak of.  Like, if someone told you to do an impression of Rocky Balboa, or Apollo Creed, or Clubber Lang, or Ivan Drago, or hell, even Paulie, you’d know exactly what to do, right?  They all have distinctive speech patterns, facial expres­sions, body language.  Adonis Creed/Johnson is a blank.  There­fore this movie is kind of a yawn.

And yes, the ending just recycles installments one and six.  I guess one of the reasons I was so disappointed by these last two movies is that I had thought I was in for the redemption of the ludicrous: I knew Rocky IV by heart and was well acquainted with its ludicrousness, and I was looking forward to seeing it and its predecessors (including the equally ludicrous III) used as foundation stones for actually good films to build upon.  But, nah, even the supposedly good Rocky films just deliver the same stuff IV does: comedy moments, premise setup, big setback, training montage(s), final fight.  When I went poking around to see why critics seemed to like what are effectively VI and VII, I was surprised to find that a lot of it boiled down to “Great training montage!” and “Wow, slick camera work on that fight!” 

But I will conclude this article by talking about two running themes through the series.  Actually, I guess the first one I’ve already touched on a few times, so I won’t belabor it: these movies are about getting old.  It makes sense that Creed would be, with Rocky pushing seventy, but IV and Balboa both present us with characters hoping against hope that 1% battery life might be enough for one last hurrah, II and V are about trying to put one life stage in the rearview mirror and move on to the next one, and III is about youthful hunger vs. mature contentment (with the latter, as noted, presented as a fearsome threat).  Even the very first film has a lot to say about being past one’s prime, with Mickey dismissing Rocky as having wasted his potential and Paulie dismissing Adrian as “dried up”, or getting there.  It’s interesting that this franchise has been fretting about aging for forty years and counting.

The other thing that jumped out at me was this.  Line 83 of my Rocky IV switch statement reads, “Drago, in the manner of an Ayn Rand hero, yells at the Soviet premier that he fights for himself.”  But that actually is the message of all of these movies!  The ’70s were called “the Me Decade”, and over and over and over the Rocky films show that they took that ethos to heart.  It’s not just that so many of these films hinge on Rocky insisting on taking on fights against the pleas of others, mumbling that he has to be true to himself.  When Adrian is yelling at Rocky in III, she tells him that he has to beat Clubber Lang solely for himself: “Not for the people, not for the title, not for money or me, but for you. Just you. Just you alone.”  Rocky passes on the same advice to Adonis in Creed, telling him that the secret to victory is “doing it for yourself. Not for me, not your father’s memory, but for you.” As a kid, I just assumed that Drago’s “I fight to win! For me! FOR ME!” outburst was meant to portray him as an arrogant villain, but… you know, given how he echoes the other good guys in the series, I think he actually is supposed to be an Ayn Rand hero here!  He’s rejecting communism in favor of individualism, and in rejecting the former ideology⁠—showing that he, too, can change⁠—helping to bring about the end of the Cold War.

"War" (Vince DiCola, 1985)

	comment on Tumblr	reply via email	support this site	return to the Calendar page