Marlborough Express - Weekend Express
Creed II beats the sequel odds
(M, 130 mins) Directed by Steven Caple Jr ★★★1⁄2 Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett
It’s no bad thing to be caught out with preconceptions. And this Rocky/Creed late-in-life flurry has made a muppet of me – not once or twice, but three times now.
When Rocky VI appeared in 2006, me, you and the rest of the fight movie-fan wha¯ nau all assumed it would be a travesty of a thing, destined to fail on the screen and a shoo-in for every Golden Raspberry the season had to offer.
A plot revolving around Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa coming out of retirement to take on a brash young champ sounded like the vanity project to end them all.
So colour me surprised and quietly delighted when the film actually wrapped up the series with more dignity, heart and manaakitanga than anyone could have reasonably expected. Plus, every film reviewer in the world got to pretend we were the first to call it ‘‘Aging Bull’’. So there’s that.
And then again in 2016, when film-maker Ryan Coogler (who went on to direct Black Panther) came up with the idea of the son of deceased champ Apollo Creed (see Rocky IV) as a young fighter, approaching Balboa to be his trainer. Creed shouldn’t have worked as well as it did, but Coogler, his star Michael B Jordan and a terrifically worldweary and soulful Stallone knocked it out of the park.
Creed is one of my go-to movies on long-haul flights and it still puts the dust in my eye every damn time.
So now this. The probably inevitable sequel. Surely now there has to be a stumble in Stallone’s twilight career?
But no. Creed II, against all odds, really isn’t too shabby at all.
The film picks up where Creed left off. Adonis – Donnie – Creed is a newly minted heavyweight champion, still haunted by the memory of his dad and a dose of impostor syndrome that plays as nicely authentic.
Wife Bianca wants to leave Philadelphia and relocate to LA, but Creed wants to stay close to his ageing mentor Balboa.
Out of Balboa’s past comes the spectre of Ivan Draco (Dolph Lundgren), the man who beat Apollo Creed to death in the ring in 1985, with a fresh challenger for the belt.
Draco’s own son Victor is a bull of a man, with exactly the sort of scowl and chip on the shoulder I’m guessing you don’t ever want to see on the guy in the other corner of the ring.
Creed II really isn’t much more than a remake of Rocky IV, complete with a self-knowing homage to that film’s muchderided and parodied training montage.
But, new director Steven Caple Jr (Emmett Till) keeps the film at a simmer in between the bouts and his cast are uniformly terrific. Jordan is just about the most-watchable actor around right now and Tessa Thompson (Sorry To Bother You )is perfectly cast as Bianca.
Wood Harris (he was Avon Barksdale in The Wire) finds some good moments as a fight trainer and cornerman.
Stallone has said this will his last-ever appearance as Balboa and I hope that is true. But I’m more thankful than I ever could have imagined in 2006 that this last, near-trilogy of outings, exists at all.