Lessons Learned From Rocky I-Rocky III

Well, I still have this newsletter, even if my pasta pass has expired. I don’t have Facebook, though, as I deactivated my account for crossing what this philosophy professor who wrote an opinion column for the New York Times this weekend described as “a moral red line” around the company’s behavior. (Fun game: Try reading that column without hearing every word of it in your head in the voice of Chidi from The Good Place!) I’ll probably have more to say about leaving Facebook sometime soon, but first, I wanted to write a little bit about Creed II, which I saw last week. If you signed up for this newsletter strictly for details about my Olive Garden meals, and feel as though your inbox has been hijacked, you may unsubscribe with no hard feelings. I promise that not every subsequent newsletter will be about Rocky movies.

But I feel obligated to make that promise, because if there’s any random piece of pop ephemera that has been as successfully integrated into My Personal Brand as the Olive Garden, it’s probably Creed, which is my favorite movie, and which I’ve probably seen at least forty times in the three years since it was released. I went into it with low expectations, given that it was essentially Rocky VII, but with an open heart and engaging my full capacity to be delighted, and I was. I thought it would be a pretty good Rocky movie, because I knew Ryan Coogler was a good director with a story to tell, and I knew Michael B. Jordan was a good actor in literally everything he’s ever been in—but I didn’t expect it to be a particularly good movie on its own terms, let alone a transcendent one. But it was. Creed is about families and the way they’re built, bodies and the way they fail, and identities and the way they’re constantly being reconstructed. It spends two-plus hours answering the question that’s at the heart of every Rocky movie (and most good boxing movies, and maybe most good movies in general), which is: Why fight when you don’t have to?

Donnie has his reasons for fighting in Creed, and they make sense. Everything that doesn’t make sense about the Rocky franchise gets thrown out. Rocky Balboa as iconic sports figure? That makes sense. Apollo Creed as the most famous fighter who ever lived? Definitely. The fraught-but-loving relationship between the two men (Apollo calls Rocky “Stallion” to his face throughout the sequels, we should all have a friend like that)? Absolutely. The other shit, though, gets dropped. We know that Apollo died in the ring because Rocky hesitated to throw in the towel, but we don’t go into the details of that, because it’s, er, incredibly stupid: Apollo decided to fight a Soviet Super Boxer named Ivan Drago despite being too old and despite Drago being a cartoonish cyborg capable of punching with many times the force of an ordinary man, got beaten to death in a match that had Drago continually pound the shit out of him after the bell, and Rocky went to Russia to avenge his death by blocking all of Drago’s punches with his face until the Soviet fighter renounced communism and eventually wore himself out enough that the Italian Stallion could fell him—at which point the entire Russian politburo began a slow clap, and glasnost began. (Also, Rocky buys both his son and his best friend ‘80s robots, one of which gets reprogrammed with a Sexy Lady Voice!)

So yeah—Creed doesn’t go into the stupid shit. Because I am a Creed super-fan, Fast Company asked me to interview Ryan Coogler a few years back, and I got to ask him about that, and he explained why:

So that’s how Creed, which was written by Ryan Coogler and not Sylvester Stallone, handled the dumb shit. Creed II, which was written by Sylvester Stallone (and a co-writer named Juel Taylor), handles that stuff differently.

In Creed II, the dumb shit happened! Basically the same way we saw it happen in Rocky IV. There are clips of Rocky getting punched in the face over and over again by Ivan Drago, despite the fact that he’s supposed to be a good boxer who just somehow doesn’t believe in defense.Dolph Lundgren, who played Drago, is all over this movie. I have no doubt that there’s a deleted scene somewhere where Paulie’s robot gets rolled out of some musky storage unit somewhere. Creed II still tries to maintain the tone that Coogler set for Creed, but the more seriously you take Rocky IV, the less possible that is, and Creed II takes Rocky IV very seriously. It cares about what it means to have been the Russian golden boy boxer who got beat, and subsequently cast out, right at the same time that the Soviet Union was falling apart. (Something a Russian historian friend of mine, who otherwise detested the movie, acknowledged was something that might have happened.) It cares about what Rocky said to Adrian when he proposed in Rocky II. It cares about getting applause out of the audience when Brigitte Nielsen shows up. It’s for anyone who’s spent decades wondering “What would it be like if Ivan Drago showed up to Rocky’s restaurant after closing to talk, man to man?”

Which maybe makes it sound like I hated it, but I didn’t. It doesn’t redeem the absurdity of Rocky IV movie, but it does retcon in just a tiny bit of depth, if you squint. The craft of the filmmaking is generally strong, which has not been true of every Rocky movie, so it’s automatically in the top half of the franchise just because it’s not as dumb as Rocky IV, as vile as Rocky V, as boring as a good chunk of Rocky II, or as belabored as Rocky Balboa. (Quick Rocky power rankings: Creed, Rocky, Rocky III, Creed II, Rocky II, Rocky Balboa, Rocky IV, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Assassin’s Creed, The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle, Rocky V.)

And there are things to genuinely like about it. Spoilers follow, but you can probably guess the broad strokes. There are two small, but genuinely great, moments in the movie. One is during that improbable sit-down between Rocky and Drago, where Drago notes that there are no photos of him on the wall of the restaurant, and Stallone, world-weary and sad, says, “No, there are no pictures of that,” and the way he refers to everything Drago represents, and everything that changed his life, as “that,” like his triumph over Drago/communism is something he’s spent thirty years trying to forget, is Stallone at his best. The other is near the end, once Donnie takes control of the rematch with Viktor Drago, and starts unloading on him, and the camera cuts, just for a second, to Phylicia Rashad, who watches it with a face full of sadness and sympathy for the fact that all Donnie can do is beat up the son of the man who beat her husband, and these dumb, broken boys punching their way through life. Those moments are small, but they’re special.

But mostly, Creed II fails to come up with an answer to the question at the heart of the movie, and the franchise. Donnie has no reason to fight Viktor, but he does anyway. The movie knows it’s a mistake, Rocky knows it’s a mistake, Bianca knows it’s a mistake, his mom knows it’s a mistake, even Duke, his new trainer, knows it’s a mistake. Which is fine—movies about characters who make mistakes are interesting—but then he has to fight him again, and the movie knows that it has to explain why the second fight isn’t a mistake. It knows that fighting when you don’t have to is not a rational thing, the same way that the other movies in the series know that. In Rocky, you fight even though it’s a mistake to prove that you could have been more than what you ended up being. In Rocky II, you fight because you want to see if you really have what it takes. In Rocky III, you fight because your old rival convinces you to do it. In Rocky IV, you fight because, I dunno, you want to punch out communism or something? In Rocky V, you fight because you want revenge? In Rocky Balboa, you fight even because you’ve still got some stuff in the basement. In Creed, you fight because you want to prove that you’re not a mistake, and that you’re capable of being more than whatever people think about you, more even than what you’ve told yourself is true about who you are. In Creed II, you fight even though it’s a mistake because, uh, it’s in the script?

There are a bunch of moments in Creed II where Donnie and Rocky talk about how they know what they’re fighting for this time, and they know why they’re doing it, and they know that doing it for the right reasons is going to be how they win. But they never actually bother to articulate what those reasons are. And it’s obvious that the reason they don’t do that is because the filmmakers don’t actually know.

What we’re left with is a movie that hits most of the satisfying Rocky movie beats, and has a bunch of cringeworthy leaps of logic that you have to overlook in order to really follow. The villains aren’t straight-up cartoons, but they’re not particularly real, and the audience has to do the heavy lifting of lending the emotional gravity to the story we wish we were told, rather than the one that’s on the screen. Which is fine—anybody who’s enjoyed a Rocky movie besides the first one or Creed has had to do that—but it’s not special. Creed II is a disappointing sequel to Creed, but it’s definitely the best possible sequel that Rocky IV could have had.