Movie review: ‘Creed II’ chases ghosts, but leaves fans cheering on the champ
“Creed II” doesn’t pack the same punch, either emotionally or in the ring, but as with seven “Rocky” movies before it, longtime fans will still be cheering by the end of this sequel.
Rocky Balboa, Sylvester Stallone’s best character — “Rocky” over “Rambo” every day of the year — returns here but the focus is on Adonis Creed, the son of early series champ Apollo Creed.
You remember him: Glorious battles with Rocky before taking the ring in 1985’s “Rocky IV” against Ivan Drago, the Russian half-man/half-monster whose beatdown of Creed left him dead in the ring.
Rocky got in the ring at the end of the movie and won the day back then, but as 2015’s “Creed” showed us, the Creed’s son remained haunted by those ghosts — which became a set-up for this second film, co-scripted by Stallone.
Early on, we see Adonis conquer a foe and win the heavyweight title, same as his father, and yet the young man has a hollow feeling about it without his father there to stand witness.
But this idea is always secondary for director Stephen Caple Jr. as Stallone’s script brings out the red meat: There’s a rising heavyweight boxer in Russia named Viktor Drago, the son of the man who killed the champ’s dad, and he’s calling Creed out.
If you think you know how the rest of the movie plays out, well, you’re probably right.
There are arguments between the young man and his trainer, Rocky.
There are training montages, but no punching of meat.
We have Dolph Lundgren as Ivan delivering “My son will break your boy” nostalgia threats.
What we don’t have is the kind of character development we had in “Creed,” which was the best “Rocky” movie since the first one, and one of 2015’s finest films.
But that was written and directed by Ryan Coogler (he’s an executiveproducer here), who wrote and directed “Black Panther” and made it one of 2018’s best movies.
He did an exceptional job of building a backstory for Adonis, and introducing a romance for Adonis with Tessa Thompson’s musician Bianca, and including Phylicia Rashad as Apollo’s widow who comes to love Adonis, even though she is not his mother.
Adonis as unwanted, confused and hungry in that movie was better than Adonis here as a one-note champ obsessed with revenge, but Michael B. Jordan does his best to make the character more complex.
And that’s while looking every bit the part: Jordan’s body is a knockout, ripped and graceful at the same time, with hand-speed and footwork that is “you can’t hit what you can’t see” awesome.
“Creed II” introduces no new characters, which makes me think this series may be on a boxer’s wobbly legs trying to go forward because it’s too tied to the history.
The movie too easily settles for chasing ghosts of the past, a common theme in these films’ “Do it for Mick” or “Do it for Adrian” narratives in the past.
It’s interesting how the story has others haunted by the past, too, like Rocky as father-figure to Adonis, but who has lost contact with his own son, or like a pregnant Bianca, worried that her progressive hearing loss might be passed down to their baby.
It even happens with Ivan Drago, with a whathappened-after-the-fight past from 30 years ago that we learn about here with a big surprise.
It’s a disappointment that none of these three is resolved in a truly satisfactory manner, but that won’t stop fans of a certain age from puffing our chests out by the end of the movie.
By the final bell, “Creed 2” is still a winner for those fans.
But any future installment needs the balance that Coogler provided of a youth injection to keep the current generation cheering on the champ.