Movie review: Rocky (1976) & Creed (2015)

Given the upcoming 50th birthday of the Rocky franchise and 10th anniversary of Creed, let's take a jog up the steps of memory lane.

Rocky (1976)

Next Time It's Personal
Calling 'Rocky' a boxing movie is a misnomer. As I said in my review of 'Journeyman',"Rocky is mostly about a guy who likes a girl who works in a pet-store". It's a drama film first and foremost. Despite the huge acclaim this film has enjoyed for half a century, it's one I never rated that highly after first seeing it as a teenager.

Rewatching it for the first time in over a dozen years, 'Rocky' reminds me of that 1950s sci-fi flick 'Forbidden Planet'. As far as the structure and the editing goes, it's the movie equivalent of a boxer after a successful training camp, it's as lean and as trim as could be. Losing anything further would do more harm than good. How many of you remember that the fight between Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed takes place on New Year's Day? It's easy to overlook because there's no scene where Rocky and Adrian go to watch the fireworks. Even the bicentennial angle is incidental.

It is an immensely basic plot. It's so simple that someone with the acting range of Sylvester Stallone was able to play the leading man. Various film nerds and academic types have done analyses of movies reverting to simplicity/familiarity during times of socio-economic uncertainty or strife because complexity is what audiences want to escape from. It's supposedly why cinema today is big on remakes and reboots, and supposedly why the 1970s was big on book adaptations, sequels, and throwbacks to the Hollywood's Golden Age.

That Classical Hollywood era, teeming with boxing movies, served audiences experiencing the Great Depression, just like 'Rocky' provided a feel-good picture for those still feeling the effects of the 1970s recession. He doesn't become champion at the end of the movie but who cares? It's not about the title, it's about the fella getting the gal. Any thought that enters your head wondering about the outcome of the fight is drowned out by Bill Conti's majestic score and Sylvester Stallone's cris de coeur. The most iconic quote of the entire Rocky franchise is "Adrian!", it's the only part of the film where it's impossible to imagine the line being delivered by another actor.

But there is something that makes the story of 'Rocky' slightly more complex than those preceding mid-century films. 'Rocky' is an American movie. And so, as American media invariably goes, it's also about race. Hold your horses before you call me crazy, friend. I too had a hard time believing it at first. An ungenerous surface level reading could make it possible to dismiss Rocky (the character) as a 'White Hope' and yet it isn't that straightforward. Rocky doesn't show any personal animosity towards any jigaboo in the movie. In fact, he quite likes the champ: Apollo Creed. In one scene where a barman dismisses Creed as a "jig clown", Rocky takes offense at the great heavyweight champion being called a clown.

The biggest racial element is that Carl Weathers is a black man and his character is very obviously based on then-champion Muhammad Ali (with a veneer of Don King style jingoism). Apollo Creed is living the high life. His white promoter takes orders from him, a white secretary brings him tea, he has a personal barber, he's confident and self-assured as well-dressed black reporters interview him on television. Meanwhile, Rocky lives in the ghetto. The young teens smoking away their futures are white. The night-time singers on the corner next to a trashcan fire are white. The homeless rummies passed out on the street are white. Rocky's apartment is one of the scuzziest ever seen in an Oscar-winning movie. The world has gone upside down.

The worst indignation is that Rocky's locker is taken from him and given to a local jig. A description of the gym in Stallone's 'Rocky' script explicitly tells us "The room is divided – Fifty percent Black – thirty-five percent Latin – ten percent white – five percent other". Rocky feels like he's being replaced and it's being done to him for the benefit of the black fighters that now dominate his gym as much as they dominate what was once his sport. They're the future; Rocky is told he's a bum. An old poster of Rocky Marciano, the last white heavyweight champion, hangs in the apartment to remind us of when things were greater. Marciano's poster watches over Rocky, like the painting of White Jesus watching over the fight in the beginning scene.

The black fighter who takes Rocky's locker, Dipper, originally had another scene later in the movie that wasn't in the final cut, one where he repeatedly calls Rocky "boy" and demands that Rocky kisses his feet, because Dipper believes he is better than Rocky. Another scene that didn't make it into the finished film had Rocky describing a pile of telegrams he receives as saying "'Kill the nigger' or 'Hope you die, Honky'". Stallone knew how white audiences in the 1970s would read the movie 'Rocky' while the titular character stays endearingly blind to it. The antagonistic force in the film (and, for some, America) is jig superiority. Paulie feels it too when he's treated as unwanted in his own workspace by the black newslady.

The contrast between Rocky and Paulie is why the film is so popular with conservatives (well, that and the white victimhood narrative). Both of them have a pretty crappy lot in life and neither of them get much respect. However, Paulie spends his time crying, drinking, feeling sorry for himself, and telling others to feel sorry for him. Rocky's lament is more stoic. As a Catholic, he (largely) doesn't balk at the suffering and gets on with the job, he'll even do it alone if he has to. The irony is that Rocky doesn't actually earn his title shot. He doesn't pull himself up by his bootstraps. It's the champion who plucks The Italian Stallion out of the ghetto by giving him an unearned opportunity, not for his championship mettle, but for the color of his skin.

Race plays an even more explicit role in the next two movies (and in 'Rocky III' especially) but that story isn't going anywhere. Now that that's out of the way with, I do think there's a lot to like about 'Rocky'. Mainly the character himself. Everyone loves an underdog and it's hard not to root for the palooka whether he's trying to win the fight or trying to win the girl. A couple of tricks Stallone uses to make Rocky sympathetic are dumbing him down (Rocky calls himself stupid + struggles with spelling) and having people insult and disrespect him. Talia Shire is very sweet as Adrian, and she has her own battles to win as well. One particularly poignant scene is when Rocky is inviting her into his apartment for the first time, it's the part where she overcomes her chronic shyness and finds the strength to climb the steps. Coach Mickey has a little steps moment too as he takes 20 seconds to lumber up the stairs to Rocky's front door to feebly beg for a chance at being a somebody.

There are some nice little parallel constructions in the movie. Early in the film Rocky talks to his pet turtles and tells them "if you guys could sing or dance I wouldn't be doing this", when Adrian later asks him why he fights, he tells her "because I can't sing or dance". Paulie and Adrian's occupations mirror each other too; Adrian works with pets and Paulie works as a butcher. And of course, the one to cap off the big training montage.

What is there to say about the uplifting soundtrack that hasn't already been said? You can change any number of individual things about 'Rocky' and it would still be an enjoyable movie, but the theme music is what elevated it into being an enduring movie. It makes you believe a man can fly. Boxing movies were never the same after 'Rocky'. They became less about fighters being set-up and the harder they fall, Rocky was about getting up even when you're being told to stay down.

Final Review Scores
In a word: Ham-and-egger
In an idiom: Put my city on the map
In a number: 7.60
In an emoji: 🥏
In a musical I've not seen: Guys and Dolls

'Rocky'
Starring Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire, Carl Weathers, Burt Young, and Burgess Meredith
Directed by John G. Avildsen
Written by Sylvester Stallone
Produced by Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff
Production company: Chartoff-Winkler Productions
Runtime: 01:59:35

Creed (2015)

Rocky VII: Adrian's Revenge!
Time flies, eh? Both IRL and in-universe. For starters, HBO Boxing features more than I remembered in this movie as 24/7 gets a prominent shoutout. But I couldn't be hit with maximum nostalgia as late-stage Jim Lampley and Max Kellerman really phone in their calls of the final fight scene. The man tasked with soft-relaunching a beloved series, co-writer and director Ryan Coogler, said that "At the core of these movies, it's really a relationship drama with an action sequence at the end". And yet this feels like the first in the franchise to really hone in on trying to be a boxing movie. Or more accurately, actively trying to be a movie for boxing fans.

The cameo list includes Andre Ward, Gabriel Rosado, ring announcer Michael Buffer, cutman Stitch Duran, and a few other real-life sports media personalities. Our #1 P4P fighter in this fictional world is Tony "you'll never see me again" Bellew. That's a lot of people who the casual movie-goer won't be familiar with. Whereas almost everyone who saw 'Rocky' in 1976 knew who Joe Frazier was. And if you didn't know Smokin' Joe then at least the price of admission treated you to a film which requires no prior knowledge. Meanwhile, 'Creed' relies on you having seen at least two of the previous movies in the franchise. And even then the story feels unsure of itself.

About 45 minutes into the movie, Adonis Creed (the OC son of Apollo Creed) asks "Rock, what are we training for?" and it's a fair question. The movie is almost halfway over and there's still no real goal for Adonis. What are the stakes for him? Why should the audience care beyond the connection to previous movies? He's able to quit his cushy finance job and move from his mansion in California to an austere, but not particularly scuzzy, apartment in Philadelphia. Compare this to the first Rocky movie, where Apollo Creed decides to give the washed-up main character a title shot just after the 30 minute mark. From that moment on the audience knows what the stakes are, even though Rocky himself doesn't find out until about 25 minutes later. Adonis actually gets his life-changing handout right at the start of the film, when he's rescued from juvie by Mary Anne (Apollo Creed's widow).

In a 2016 interview with Vulture, Ryan Coogler and Michael B. Jordan bemoan the unrelatable portrayals of black people in euro-normative art. Coogler's solution? "Just hire us, bruh. Hire me and let me work". Jordan adds "The majority of roles out there are written not by us" — meaning young black people — "so if [most writers’] only interaction with someone who looks like me is from stereotypes, what you see on TV, then those are the types of roles that are going to keep getting written". It's a point undercut by the stereotypes that did make it into the movie. The fatherless young black kid growing up to be a restless and Angry Black Man, the well-represented black faces in the juvie, the jig moment of standing on business when that dude calls Adonis "Baby Creed". The soundtrack didn't necessarily have to be rap and R&B music either. Jazz, rock, and soul were the dominant black music genres once upon a time and it'd be less stereotypical to have those scoring the scenes.

There are two main themes for characters in 'Creed'. The first is loss; Adonis's daddy issues because Apollo died before he was born (and turning to Rocky for a father figure), Rocky's loneliness because Adrian and Paulie are dead (which is why he's already lost the will to live when he gets his cancer diagnosis), and Bianca's hearing loss. The second theme is perserverance, they fight on because giving up is not an option. I just don't think there's enough of a hook in these relationship dramas. The verisimilitude takes a backseat too as Rocky's son, Peter Petrelli, doesn't come to visit his cancer-stricken father.

I didn't know this until looking more into the film but the story beats were informed and inspired by Ryan Coogler's personal life. You can say that about a lot of art. But in a 2016 Variety interview Coogler explains that the relationship with his father, which changed after he became seriously ill and passed away, was what inspired him to write the story. Co-writer Adrian Covington lost his father too to cancer. Later in the same interview Coogler mentions: "My fiancée is a sign language interpreter and her mother has hearing loss. Her younger sister has hearing loss. So it was great to kind of bring awareness to those folks." Make of it what you will, it's certainly one way to write an original Rocky sequel.

Another way is to give the love interest even less of an arc than the hyper-docile Adrian. We first see Bianca when Adonis asks her to turn the music down, then when she's performing in some club, and her next scene is going on a not-a-date date with Adonis. In the script though they actually have a conversation in that second scene after her set. She gives him the cold shoulder and brushes him off because she's too busy with work, in the final film she goes out with him at the first time of asking. A bigger change is that she originally didn't have hearing loss.

In this early draft, Kayla Clabsaddle (Adonis's little sister) is deaf and communicates with American Sign Language. Bianca was originally disowned by her conservative muslim parents. Adonis lost his family, she's lost her family. It's something for them to relate about, y'see. But the musician who one day won't hear her music? The irony makes it more tragic and more sympathetic. Rocky also has a diagnosis to make him sympathetic. Adonis only has his childhood trauma and his anger problems, both of which don't feel as big when you remember that he's a rich kid, there are plenty of people with those kinds of problems who can't afford to quit their crappy jobs on a whim or have access to the best therapists money can buy.

But I digress. The main thing is they all have problems and they'll support each other in overcoming these problems. Except Bianca for most of the third act. Tessa Thompson sadly pulls the short straw as the movie is more interested in the story of Rocky & Adonis. So that's the relationship drama, what about the big action sequences? In 'Rocky' the entire movie is bookended by fights. At the start, Rocky struggles against a fellow club fighter before knocking out the bum in a fit of rage. He doesn't fight another person until he gets in the ring with the champ.
'Rocky' is no more about boxing than 'A Streetcar Named Desire' is about public transportation.

'Creed' is about boxing in the same way that 'There Will Be Blood' and the Iraq wars were about oil. This movie has several fights. The amateur fight in Mexico (Adonis wins by KO), the first sparring match (Adonis wins by KO), the second sparring match (Adonis loses against Andre Ward), the fight against Gabriel Rosado (Adonis wins by KO), another sparring match (result not shown), and the fight at the end. They at least look cool and aim for more realism than the old-fashioned and later comical entries in this franchise. However, that doesn't leave a lot of time for the rushed relationship dramas or for bigging up Tony Bellew as a rival.

I'm not going to count but I'm confident Bellew has fewer lines and fewer scenes than Apollo Creed. Maybe the big sell is supposed to be when Bellew breaks Andre Ward's jaw with a sucker punch? Besides a few of his IRL highlights being shown, it's unconvincing that this light heavyweight is the best fighter in the world or much of a celebrity in-universe. At least Apollo Creed was seen on TV several times. Plus he was in better shape. One scene that would've helped was a deleted one where Adonis phones home to Mary Anne and says he'll be fighting Bellew, and her reaction is the standard "have you lost your mind!?" talk. You're missing a step if the underdog doesn't feel like he's in danger at the climax.

Having not seen the movie in almost a decade, I actually forgot that the last fight takes place at (a green screen approximation of) Goodison Park. Setting the finale in Britain was an odd choice for an American movie. Yes, European boxing has been taking off since the IBF and WBO doubled the number of boxing champions. But it wasn't like American boxing had fallen off of the face of the Earth. Plus it's a fictional movie, it could've been set anywhere and against anyone. We know why the first Rocky movie isn't set in Latin America despite how many great latino fighters there were in the 1970s. There's no good reason for Tony Bellew to be the final boss. A reason might be that Coogler and/or Covington probably saw him fight Adonis Stevenson when they were writing the script in 2013.

Too many staples are absent here (though Bellew does a good job of sneering "boy"), they're eschewed so there's more room for tropes, cliches and fights on both the boxing and relationship sides. There's no 'climbing the steps' moment from a character perspective. This movie is just too beholden to real-world boxing and its many problems, nobody would have held it against them if they pruned some of it and shifted the focus. While it may feel slightly unfair to compare 'Creed' to 'Rocky' so much, that was inevitably going to happen since the films are in the same franchise. If it was the same story told with original characters, would it have gotten such high ratings from critics? I'm not sure.

'Rocky' worked as a movie because it was an intentional call-back to an earlier age of Hollywood (and because Rocky is a likable character, as he is in this film too). 'Creed', for better or worse, was trying to do something new while sewing itself to someone else's tapestry and coloring with borrowed paints. Even the training montage steps moment when Adonis runs across Philly flanked by bikes as Meek Mill blares ends with him looking up to Rocky. The first Adonis Creed movie cannot stand alone, it has to stand in Sylvester Stallone's shadow. Michael B. Jordan and Ryan Coogler will get their time in the sun but we'll get to that some other time. I haven't seen 'Rocky V' in years either but it might make appreciate this one some more eventually.

Final Review Scores
In a word: Jawn-strung
In a YouTube comment: guy who rapped in this scene drilled by diddy lmao
In a number: 6.18
In an emoji: 🔉
In an Assassin's Creed game: Unity

'Creed'
Starring Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad, and Tony Bellew
Directed by Ryan Coogler
Written by Ryan Coogler and Michael Covington
Produced by Irwin Winkler, Robert Chartoff, Sylvester Stallone et. al
Production companies: Chartoff-Winkler Productions, MGM, and New Line Cinema
Runtime: 02:13:10