Yo!
I am now a leading authority on the Rocky movies. Five days ago, I hadn’t seen any of them. Now I’ve seen ’em all. You know that theme? I’ve heard it a lot lately. I won the “Undisputed Collection” Blu-ray set about a year ago, collecting the entire series. It has sat on the shelf. I had been entertaining notions of doing the whole series in a single, 12-hour go, but finally gave up on the ambition for lack of time. I decided to watch Rocky I this week, and promptly realized I was right the first time. As much fun as I’ve had popping a Rocky movie into the player over and over again for the last five days, taking the films as mini-series probably would have been even more fun. Oh well.
Taken in sum as I have done, there is a nearly Godfatherish reach to this series, born of a law-of-averages effect that smooths out various discrepancies, movie by movie, and pops out what is, finally, a family saga. The Rocky movies benefit by this smoothing because, aside from any obvious highs and lows in quality that come as a natural part of a six-film cycle set over thirty production years, the films are, as well, two completely different types of movie packed into a single set. Rocky II, III and IV are what we popularly think of when we think of a Rocky movie: they’re the fight movies, the sports movies, so meticulous in their formula that by the time Rocky is scaling the Siberian hilltops in Rocky IV and shouting “Drago!!” at the sky, we can probably be excused for shouting along with him. They all start with a promise by Rocky that he is done with boxing, establish some sort of reason why he is not done with boxing, put him up against a seemingly indomitable foe, watch him train his body into fighting form, and then watch him win the final fight.
The other three films – as is somewhat overlooked in the case of the original Rocky, along with the last two sequels – aren’t like this at all. They have a lot of the same tropes, including, but not limited to, those sublime training montages. On the whole, however, Rocky I, V and VI are much more concerned with things that take place entirely outside of boxing, besides the basic element of their principal character being a sometime boxer. On seeing Rocky for the first time, what surprised me initially was how little boxing is in it: a bit at the beginning, a bit more at the end, and otherwise, a 2-hour movie about a guy trying to sort his life out, and the people he shares that life with. Rocky V and Rocky Balboa take this tack as well, less successfully, but it makes them interesting films, and makes Stallone an interesting actor and writer.
Rocky has been called the American Dream movie, and no matter how many times it is repeated elsewhere, it bears repeating once more that the principal allegory in the film is not one man rising above the odds to win at the game of life – what Americans like to think their “dream” is all about – but rather, one man stupid or brave or soulful enough to stay on his feet no matter how hard he gets hit. The vast storehouse of popular affection for the Rocky character isn’t seated in his ability to win fights, but in the few hours or so we spend with him before the populist mechanics of the film series require that he starts doing so. In those hours, it’s the gentle lovability of the man – hardly a perfect teddy bear, especially in the first film, but still – that creates the nowadays bizarre reality that people would still care what happened to Rocky Balboa, in all the years since he lost that first fight to Apollo Creed.
This is designed, of course, not happenstance. Stallone knew what he was doing when he created Rocky. He wasn’t just writing a script or exorcising a personal line of inquiry; he was engaged in a ruthless act of personal rebranding, and for that brand to succeed in the long term it needed to contain a much stronger emotional connection than just beefcake athleticism.
The larger overall surprise about Rocky I, then, was the degree to which the script really is a script, not just a concept or an ego piece. It’s often quite dumb and is hardly the most disciplined piece of writing ever, but it legitimately tells a story, and does so by observation rather than generic construction. It also tracks a whole ecosystem of characters – not just Rocky – all of whom have definable lives, wants, and needs, and all of whom reach various crises and successes over the course of the film. When rascally Paulie is destroying his and Adrian’s apartment in Rocky, and you realize that he has been (perhaps too quietly) begging for help from his best friend through the entirety of the film up to this point, you begin to notice that everyone else in the Rocky “family” is as dimensional and motivated as Rocky himself.
This rather enjoyable element of Rocky I makes for the first, and most jarring, difference between Rocky I and Rocky II. Though Rocky II purports to carry directly on from Rocky I, establishing the franchise-spanning motif of repeating the last five minutes of the previous film for the first five minutes of the next, we are not ten minutes into the movie before we are very clearly watching a movie that is geared in a completely different way. How can you tell? Easy: Apollo Creed. The character who, in the first film, had a quantifiable set of values and goals, immediately reverses his promise at the end of Rocky I – “no rematch!” – for reasons having nothing to do with character and everything to do with plot. This unmotivated change-of-heart does admissibly, if clumsily, set up the single-point requirement of Rocky II – there must be a rematch, and Rocky must win – but it’s a piss-poor thing to do to the Apollo character, from which he does not recover in Rocky II. He suffers a fate usually reserved for the female leads in action movies: serving to motivate plot, rather than exist as a character (a fate he will similarly suffer in Rocky IV). Don’t worry, though; Apollo makes a hell of a good showing in Rocky III.
Can I say that Rocky III is my favourite? Rocky I is clearly still the best film, and Rocky IV has a gauche over-the-topness that makes it damn funny to watch, but Rocky III is a slick, thoroughbred entertainment, upon which all pistons fire. Stallone, directing for the second time, picks up his game considerably over Rocky II, which found the director feeling his way around the camera more often than not. Rocky III ups all the character antes considerably: killing Mickey at the halfway point, swinging Apollo to the de facto best friend to his former opponent, and creating a villain in Clubber Lang who is so satanically uninterested in any of the “heart” that drives Rocky and Apollo that he might just as well be from another planet. Rocky III also has, flat out, the best “final fight” in all six movies, a glorious act of visual reimagining by Stallone, who genuinely seems to take what made the first two fights good and reverse it, choreographing a battle that is eye-poppingly fast, raw, and electric – rather like Stallone himself, who comes out of that robe at the end of Rocky III looking like a Ford truck that has been reformatted into a Ferrari.
By rights it should have ended there, if by rights it should not simply have ended the first time. But no, Rocky IV, V and VI dribble away the laws of diminishing returns, with some successes, some failures, and a few face-saving ties. Towards the end of the franchise, one of the largest bleeders is simply the thinning of a great cast of characters – Mickey departing in Rocky III, Apollo in Rocky IV, and poor Adrian between Rocky V and Rocky Balboa. From an integral role in Rocky I, Talia Shire’s Adrian suffered ups and downs of relevance in the next few films before successfully reestablishing herself, and Adrian’s relationship with Rocky, as the key yin-yang at the center of the series.
With Adrian absent for Rocky Balboa, though, we’re left with just Rocky and Paulie – hardly the most intriguing or charismatic member of the circle – to cross the finish line together. (This is not to discount the welcome appearances of Tony Burton, who is a consistent pleasure with minimal screen time, and builds his series-spanning charisma up to, I think, the single best training speech in the whole franchise, in Rocky Balboa – describing at length how Rocky’s decrepit, calcified body is good for pretty much nothing besides the delivery of blunt-force “hurt bombs.”) The later movies also fail to develop Robbie, Rocky and Adrian’s son, as a compelling character in his own right, curtailing any hope that he might fill the gap that Adrian leaves behind. Rocky V makes the sentimental mistake of casting Stallone’s own son, Sage, in the Robbie role, and while it might be cute to watch the kid get his first girlfriend (or, more to the heart of the thing, beat up his first opponent), the tension between Rocky and Robbie is nonexistent. This continues apace in Rocky Balboa, where Milo Ventimiglia, with all the magneticism of half a bottle of dishpan liquid, plays Robbie as an adult.
After Apollo, Clubber, and Drago, the Rocky series also runs clean out of interesting villains after Rocky IV. Both Tommy Gunn and Mason “The Line” Dixon, in the fifth and sixth films, fail to capture the cinematic dynamism of their predecessors. They are undifferentiated characters played by non-actors (both opponents were played by professional boxers), and the result would be weak storytelling even if Rocky had not already surmounted such impressive physical hills. On a pure visual level, who can forget Ivan Drago towering over Rocky, glistening with metallic might? Or the sheer quantity of crimson transformation heaped upon Rocky’s face in not one, but two movie-ending fights with Apollo Creed? For that matter, who can forget the laughable, but damned enjoyable, invasion of Hulk Hogan in Rocky III? Dixon and Gunn just don’t seem that hard to beat, compared to their forebears. For all the narrative and stylistic successes of the swat-fight between Rocky and Dixon at the end of Rocky Balboa, the opponent is just a watered-down replay of everything Rocky’s done before. The point? If so, not worth it.
I’m warmer to Rocky V than I suppose most people are, though I can understand why, if you were a fan of the series, believing the fifth film to be the end of the story for a decade or more would have been vexing. Rocky Balboa, though, is a much more interesting film, and a much more interesting film project, than just about anything else in the series. As a movie it is of course only partially successful, but as an expression of the impetus to circle this storyline back around and pay back some of the love that had been shown towards Rocky from the moment he first stepped on screen, Rocky Balboa provokes thoughtfulness. Unlike many of its predecessors, it almost never loses sight of Rocky as a principal character, and Rocky’s world as a key supporting character. The screenplay might be nothing special, but directorially, it’s the work of a much younger man. Compare the energy of interest in Rocky Balboa to the degree that Stallone sleepwalks through his performance in Rocky IV, for example (a fucking cutesy robot?!), and you can see the wonderful clarity and gratitude that age bring.
There is a montage cut into the end credits of Rocky Balboa of people repeating Rocky’s run up the steps in Philadelphia. It happens all the time; I’ve done it myself, long before seeing the films. Closing the franchise on that beat makes for an obvious point, perhaps, but it’s still a good one: as far as Stallone is concerned, and this writer agrees, we all made these movies; they are by their fans and for their fans, upheld by their fans and kept alive by their fans. Rocky Balboa pays off the love that Rocky planted, and that’s fine by me.
I guess I should do the Rambos now, huh?