Kicking it in the ring, old-school
The ’Rocky’ franchise gets to its feet one more time to land a creditable couple of punches.
IT’S 2015, and an ageing Rocky Balboa is living out his twilight years tending to a Philadelphia restaurant named after his departed wife. He still has a voice that sounds like a tectonic grumble deep in the earth, and his face has a distant resemblance to a misshapen vegetable after the legendary pummelling his “granite chin” endured in many rounds in the square ring.
Rocky is an American myth living a shadowed afterlife away from the beam of the floodlights and the roar of the crowd. As everyone knows, sport has become a spectacular disguise for proxy war between nations, and every tournament is a condensation of existential and national allegories. Any given SuperSport advert will feature a selection of “okes” sweating on behalf of their country, struggling to triumph against a spiritual foe invented by the PR campaign, and usually against a backdrop of a triumphal pop song like The Boys Are Back in Town. For our public, the chronicles of Hansie Cronje ruptured the narrative destiny of democracy-era South Africa and serve as one of the premier metaphors of the land.
So in Creed, the seventh son of the franchise, what begins as a boxing movie quickly comes to feel overcharged with far more primal themes about brotherly love, determination and the inheritance of an ancestral fate.
Adonis Creed (Michael B Jordan) is the love-child of Apollo, Rocky’s original nemesis and later friend. He’s a young pugilist with one of those radiant, glistening torsos, who cuts loose to Philly to try to forge his path in the boxing game. He goes by the name “Donnie Johnson”, trying to keep secret his heritage as the child of one of the greatest fighters in the American tradition. Soon enough he tracks down Rocky and manages to persuade the grizzled Italian Stallion out of retirement and into the position of his superstar trainer. And thus, an extraordinary team is born, with Rocky as the patient mentor, the father figure, the uncle, and Adonis as his private redemption.
And from the franchise that inaugurated the training montage (to the sounds of Eye of the Tiger), we follow the twosome on their rough regimen, with the final goal of taking on Ricky Conlan (Tony Bellew), the Liverpudlian world light heavyweight champion.
Creed feels like old-school filmmaking, thriving on 40 years of Rocky nostalgia and delivering an honest, solid sports fable. Jordan makes for a charming lead, and it’s great to have cool, black heroes in films like this, because the balance in Hollywood has been somewhat off.
The fight sequences are great: hear the electric thrum of the chanting crowd, get blinded by the wash of the overhead lights, and listen to each punch and thump, each acoustic wallop and sibilant hiss of a fist snaking through the air, while the camera lurches and swerves around the combatants.
Of course, the whole thing remains fairly predictable: Creed ends up falling for a musician who lives downstairs (Tessa Thompson), adding a bit of sexual mystique to the proceedings, and Rocky, the ol’ horse (Sylvester Stallone, by the way) falls ill, leading him into a classic confrontation with his mortality.
As far as sports films go, this one is a major resuscitation for Rocky, which succumbed to all the excesses of the ’80s during its sequel mania, even Cold War geopolitics. Here, all has been pared down and the result is lean and watchable. LS