Rocky’s still boxing CLEVER
Rising stars, old enemies and the thrill of the fight . . . you’ll be cheering until the final bell
WHEN a film is as unashamedly formulaic as Creed II, the formula had better be a good one. Fortunately, it is. Veteran boxing trainers talk about the old left-right combo and here it is in narrative form; brutality in the ring, poignancy out of it, thumped by one, hammered by the other… until finally we as an audience are on the ropes, feeling somewhat drained, wholly entertained, and perhaps also just a little bit suckered, having fallen yet again for the venerable Rocky one-two.
More than four decades and seven sequels have now passed since the 1976 original, so it’s no surprise that the formula is as polished as it is. And that’s not all that’s unchanged; Sylvester Stallone’s voice still seems to emanate from the bottom of a mineshaft. The Great Mumbler, also credited as producer and co-writer, is on top form here, just as two years ago in Creed.
As before, the acting laurels go mostly to Michael B. Jordan, terrific as newly-crowned world heavyweight champ Adonis Creed.
In the last film, you’ll recall, he discovered who his late father was. None other than Apollo Creed, who back in the day fought and befriended Rocky Balboa (Stallone). That’s why Adonis — sensibly known to friends and family as Donnie — wanted Rocky in his corner as he embarked on a pro boxing career that lacked the usual springboards of deprivation and delinquency. Adonis had money and an education. What did he want with sweaty pugilism?
It was unresolved daddy issues that made a fighter of him, of course, and in Creed II the psychology of parent-child relationships looms almost as large as Dolph Lundgren, back in the series for the first time since Rocky IV (1985) as big Ivan Drago, the man who battered Apollo Creed to death in the ring.
Drago now has an equally sizeable and impassive son, Viktor (Florian Munteanu), whose dearest wish is to flatten Adonis and thereby avenge the humiliation that the old man later suffered at the fists of Rocky, leading not only to exile from Mother Russia but also the departure of mother Ludmila, Viktor’s mum (Brigitte Nielsen, the former Mrs Sly Stallone, also last seen in Rocky IV).
Ivan and Viktor duly turn up in Rocky’s home town of Philadelphia to throw down the gauntlet. Or rather, gauntlet. ‘Because of you I lost everything,’ growls Ivan to Rocky. ‘Country. Respect. Wife.’ Not to mention possessive pronouns and definite articles. So there are mummy issues, too, in this film. Moreover, Rocky is trying to address a painful father-son estrangement of his own. A ND if all that weren’t enough, Adonis’s hearing-impaired girlfriend Bianca (Tessa Thompson) also makes him a daddy in the course of Creed II, so he must balance his new parental responsibilities with his obligations to his dead father as he decides whether or not (as if you really can’t guess) to take on Viktor Drago’s challenge.
As those psychiatrists staying at Fawlty Towers once observed, there’s enough material here for an entire conference.
Still, when was a good boxing movie only ever about the boxing? And this really is a good boxing movie, despite the yawning gap, at times, between the story and any kind of plausibility.
In the real world, fighters don’t emerge from nowhere to challenge for world titles, like Viktor does, just as punches don’t resound with thwumpfs like baby elephants landing on a few mattresses.
But there’s a cracking soundtrack,
some of it provided by the lovely Bianca (a successful singer, despite her deafness), and the film is directed with a tremendously sure touch by Steven Caple Jnr.
At just 30, he is even younger than Jordan, his leading man, but evidently Stallone wanted somehat generation at the tiller. gamble, but it pays off.
BRINGING back Wreck-It Ralph was also a gamble. The 2012 Disney animation of the same name was a huge global hit, but its characters lived in arcade video games and that world has changed even in six years.
Can Ralph (again voiced by John C. Reilly) still seem relevant today, now that the kids who might once have frequented arcades are playing their favourite games on their phones and tablets?
Ingeniously, that’s the very subject of Ralph Breaks The Internet, in which big, daft, genial Ralph, desperate to find a discontinued part for an arcade game he has inadvertently wrecked, ventures with his pal Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) through the arcade’s new WiFi router to the mysterious world of eBay.
Screenwriters Pamela Ribon and Phil Johnston (who also co-directs with Rich Moore) have great fun imagining the internet as a vast undiscovered land with Ralph and Vanellope as explorers, and there are no end of gags that will sail way over the heads of a young audience (including one which connects Al Gore and algorithm) but delight the grown-ups alongside them. Look out, too, for a somewhat self-reverential but also joyously funny scene featuring all the Disney princesses you can think of, from Snow White to Pocahontas.
At 112 minutes, the film feels overlong, but if we get the wet and windy weekend we’re being threatened with, it will more than reward your investment of time, money and popcorn.