Remember Rocky? That cornpone boxing movie from 40 years ago starring (and written by) that oiled-up, headband-wearing buffoon who talks funny? The one that stole Best Picture away from Network, All the President’s Men, Taxi Driver, and Hal Ashby’s rather more obscure Woody Guthrie biopic Bound for Glory?
Okay, on that last point, you’re technically correct; on the rest, you’re dead wrong. Rocky is one of those movies that’s been retroactively devalued by its sequels. It’s somber and observant, more about the day-to-day of a shy Philadelphia hood with a crush on the girl at the pet store than about boxing for the first hour of its 119 minutes. Here’s the other thing you might not recall: Rocky loses his fight with Apollo Creed at the end. He “merely” survives the 15-round crucible, proving to himself he’s not a coward or a quitter. Perhaps because of Bill Conti’s intrepid score, Rocky‘s inspirational qualities have tended to overshadow its existential ones, but they’re equally vital.
Of its sequels, only 2006’s Rocky Balboa had humility and brio in something like the same proportions as the original. Arriving 30 years after we first saw Rocky huff his way up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, it was a meditation on loss and mortality and raging against the dying of the light (though writer-director-star Sylvester Stallone was kind enough to leave Dylan Thomas unmentioned). As Rocky puts it in the marvelous new Creed: “Time takes everybody out. Time’s undefeated.”
He’s speaking to Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan), the illegitimate son of his opponent-turned-pal Apollo Creed, who died in the early rounds of 1985’s Rocky IV. (You’re an educated person; surely you’ve seen these movies and read them in the original Greek.) In a prologue set in 1998, Creed’s well-off widow (Phylicia Rashad) rescues the combative young Adonis from a Los Angeles juvenile detention center and adopts him. In the present day, “Donny” is a college-educated man with a good job and a bright future. But he is his absentee father’s son, competing in unsanctioned fights in Mexico on the sly.