Though this situation is about as likely to occur as the Cincinnati Reds making the World Series this year, if someone held a gun to my head and asked me my favorite legacyquel to emerge from the current crop of Hollywood’s output and demanded I’d be absolutely, truly honest with them or else, well, I’d probably say Ryan Coogler’s Creed. It isn’t an authorial statement of the creator’s contained relevance, and innovation like Fury Road is, nor is it the perfect synthesis of star, technology and loving tribute like Top Gun: Maverick, but Coogler’s update on the Rocky formula is basically the best-case scenario for this sort of film. Rather than simply retreading the events of the original, embellished with plenty of rose-tinted garnishes of faux-childlike wonder, Creed opted for a blend of compelling character-centric drama, excellent fight cinematography, and charm to spare.
It presented to us a blend of classic Stallone sentiment with the grittiness of modern Philly as a setting and the ostentation of the professional boxing world that was just genuinely rousing, especially when viewed with a packed crowd, presumably covered in dust from the ratty speakers being shaken so hard by Ludwig Gorrannson’s score. That training scene — Rocky getting chemo while Adonis (Michael B. Jordan) hits the heavy bag and goes about his routine while caring for this surrogate father, culminating in that dope sequence where, mid-jog, he’s joined by some 12 O’Clock boys on the streets, with their dirt bike tires and ATV wheels pointed at the sky as Meek Mill drops bars, and everybody greeting Rocky at the gym — still gives me goosebumps. On whatever list of my thousand-odd favorite films I have in my head, it’s got a proud position near the OG.
Creed II, on the other hand, was pretty disappointing. One could feel Coogler’s absence and, though the dude is a solid filmmaker (remember, there’s no Rocky without him as screenwriter), Sly Stallone’s attempt to fill that creative and stylistic vacuum in producing a Rocky IV sequel sort of missed the point of why both of those films work so well. IV is enduring camp perfection (in its theatrical form, at least, as I still haven’t seen Stallone’s new cut) that uses ridiculous maximalism to supplant what emotional truth and meaning that Stallone and company abandoned when they decided to make Rocky II, and Creed had somehow managed to reclaim that which was lost. As I wrote at the time, it was a fine Rocky sequel, but a poor follow-up to Creed. What was stranger was the seeming impossibility of another film in the series, no matter MGM’s determination to get one out. Coogler had long ditched the franchise he’d helped revive to go make billions with Marvel; the story, it seemed, wasn’t there, unless they were willing to totally retread the well-worn ground that the previous 6 Rocky films had and dredge up Clubber Lang’s kid or something; and, of course, Rocky himself split to go make more Expendables films and Tulsa King. How the hell do you overcome that?
Well, if you’re Michael B. Jordan, you pay homage to Sly by directing the follow-up yourself. No diss to Jordan with this, but it’s a pretty rare feat for a star to essentially assume full control of a franchise they were only a player in. Sure, Stallone is living proof that you can do it, but the expectations of blockbuster filmmaking are oftentimes much higher than they normally are when an actor transitions to a full creative role. One has to manage the audiences’ needs and wants, the scale of the production itself, detangle eight films’ worth of continuity into the natural flow of the current story that one wants to tell, and, importantly, make a lot of money for the people who have invested in your talent. Oh, and there’s that whole “making a good movie” thing, which hopefully will unite all of those traits into a swell theatrical run and a long life on home video. It’s a tall order and, again, there are so many small and simple ways that something like this could fall into the vanity project trap. Creed III avoids all of them and is perhaps the best possible outcome for a sequel under all these conditions. It’s a damn good movie, only outshined by its five-star predecessors (and though everybody will have their favorites, I really think it’s above every mainline Rocky sequel in terms of formal rigor), and Jordan does a hell of a job with it.
The problem inherent in making a sequel to a film about the journey one takes to the top is that there’s only one real direction the protagonist can go in, and downward spirals can only go so far in recapturing the drama of one’s rise. In the real world, time, unscripted scandal and agonizing injury are the dramatics that sustains these kinds of narratives — Tiger Woods coming from behind and kicking ass at Augusta in 2019 was a real athletic triumph, but it was also the capstone to a story that saw the dude lose almost everything, including his life, and the emotions one felt in that moment at the 18th hole were because of that context, much of which was even known to the kind of person who couldn’t give less of a fuck about golf. It’s much, much harder to achieve that level of pathos in two fictional hours, but the solution that Jordan and his screenwriters come to is particularly ingenious. Instead of having Adonis face a challenger coming from out of nowhere for his belts, we see him well into retirement, three years since he unified the titles and comfortably retired after putting his old foe Ricky Conlan onto the canvas. He’s transitioned to life as a promoter, working with the sport’s best prospects and helping them train at his LA gym. He’s a family man, as well, comfortable with his wife Bianca (Tessa Thompson) taking the spotlight with her music career, and takes doting care of his deaf daughter. It would take something genuinely nuts to put him back in the ring again, and he’s well and truly rusted.
That genuinely-nuts-something comes in the form of Dame (Jonathan Majors), a genuinely novel addition to the Rocky formula. See, one thing one can’t say about the Rocky movies is that they have particularly compelling antagonists, perhaps outside of Apollo Creed himself. There hasn’t been a particularly memorable one since before the collapse of the USSR, but even the iconic ones are caricatures: Drago, the Soviet strongman, Lang, the crazed knockout artist, even Apollo, who was the first film’s fictionalized take on Muhammad Ali. Dame is a synthesis of these details, a total of the influence of the various fists that have landed on the chins of a Balboa or a Creed, but, importantly, he is a dynamic character. He was once Adonis’ only friend in the world, back when the two of them were stuck in the system as abandoned problem children, and their bond continued afterward. Dame dreamed of the same things that Adonis did — title fights in Africa, fame and fortune and acknowledgment – but one night in 2002, Adonis started a fight with someone that the pair had a history with at the group home, and Dame took the fall. He’s been rotting in prison for the last two decades, watching his best pal live his best life, and understandably wants to reconnect with his brother. He does so one afternoon by surprising Creed at his gym, and the pair seem to hit it off despite the absolute gulf in their differing experiences.
Adonis Creed’s imposter syndrome is the character’s hamartia, the tragic flaw in his personality that makes him particularly vulnerable to metaphorical arrows from fleeing Trojan princes, and Jordan wisely returns and twists that quality to great usage here. In Creed, he just wanted to prove to all comers that he was his father’s son, with that insecurity being the source of his weakness. In order to do so, he had to find the only person with the littlest amount of self-doubt that one could be born with and convince him to believe in him — his talent, his skill and, most importantly, his character – so that he could rightly understand his place in the world. Here, he’s confronted with three sequential facts. First, his actions led to his best friend spending a quarter of his life in prison. Second, he’s living his best friend’s dream, almost to an uncomfortable degree of accuracy. While he relaxes in a palatial estate, his boy is rotting in a shitty Crenshaw extended stay, trying not to think about the ankle monitor strapped to the side of his shin. Third, Dame might be a better fighter than him — young Adonis used to be his cornerman when Dame was tearing up the amateur circuits in the aughts — and he’s somewhat thankful that he doesn’t have to square off with him again. But Dame has plans, and he might just use that help Adonis gave him — a job sparring with the current champion — to make moves to the top, by whatever means necessary.
What’s so great about the pairing of Jordan and Majors is that their talents are so well-suited to one another’s skillset. Jordan has a vulnerable side, masked by the stoic charisma that makes him a bona fide Movie Star. At the same time, Majors is endlessly expressive, his face containing entire paragraphs’ worth of emotional context and detail in every movement. Notably, one can see the kids they were in them at all times, and though they’re weathered and bruised from the intervening years, the hurt — and the brotherhood — remains perceptible. It’s a tremendously compelling conflict, and Jordan shoots it handsomely, with a keen sense of patience. There are a few things one could complain about in how the film’s directed — the crowd scenes are an ugly CGI mess, which I imagine was as much of a concession to COVID times as much as an artistic or budgetary choice — but the foundation is well-built, with the development of these characters and their quests for catharsis being often more involving than the fights themselves.
That’s not to say that the in-ring action is bad in the slightest, though. I appreciated Jordan’s approach here, though the first significant fight in Coogler’s Creed will always probably be my top choice for boxing-on-screen done in the current century. He is prone to joyous exaggeration, with anime-style angles and focus mixed with a kind of NBA Jam-like emphasis the extremities of movement and contact. This may be the first movie in the Boxing canon to internalize the stylistic contributions of the video game era fully — the details that Dame and Adonis observe about the conditions of their opponents feel plucked from Fight Night — and it feels remarkably fresh. It’s an even grander spectacle in IMAX, with the fights themselves blowing up to the full aspect ratio on screen, only enhancing the mythic quality of those moments. And near the end, when Jordan fully embraces metaphor and allows for a momentary lapse into fantasy (both to make a mid-fight montage feel novel and explore the inner emotional landscape of the combatants), Creed III gets particularly exciting.
If you’re looking for the answer to how to make a Rocky movie without Rocky, well, Jordan has it. His laser-like focus on the characters here and the rousing nature of the story he’s able to tell with them distracts wholly from any pangs of frustration one might feel with its very existence. Reduced to its most simple elements, a boxing match is just what one reads on the Tale of the Tape and what lies on the judges’ scorecards, even though that is subject to bias. What the combatants bring to the ring with them is where the drama lies — even in a video of a street fight outside of a nightclub, our eyes scan the setting, the clothing worn by and the size of the crowd, and the skills (or lack thereof) of the participants to try and wring whatever context we can out of the moment to sustain our interest. Sure, the skill can be compelling enough, but at the end of the day, it’s just punching. On the other hand, fighting is endowed with meaning, and like its stellar predecessors, Creed III finds substance, heart, and glory in the beating and bloodying.