Creed II

I’ve never seen a full “Rocky Film” – but I have seen the previous “Creed”, and liked it as a smart, populist boxing film about a young man finding himself and coming to terms with his legacy and his desire to excel at his chosen profession. And I’m aware of the Rocky films as a sort of shared cultural memory – the mild-mannered Italian boxer who rises to the championship in the face of various rivals while developing his relationship with his girlfriend, then wife, Adrian. I’m particularly aware of the wildly nationalistic, very very 80s, Rocky IV, which sees Rocky take on Ivan Drago, an evil Russian who kills his former opponent Apollo Creed in the ring before Rocky sets things right in a climactic fight right in the middle of the Soviet Union.

And to a certain extent, the setup for this film is a little gimmicky – Adonis Creed fights the son of the man who killed his father, Viktor Drago. It’s acknowledged early on that this is a cheap marketing ploy on the part of a boxing promoter, but there’s also emotional baggage here – Adonis’ desire to avenge the father he never knew, and Viktor, trained by Ivan to redeem what he perceives as his 30-years-old failure. And certainly the melodrama comes fairly regularly – Adonis also has to deal with his girlfriend’s encroaching deafness, and Rocky’s own reluctance to reengage with the brutality of the  past. This does lack the finely tuned sense of the first Creed, bringing far more melodrama and flat out cheese to the story. But dammit, a lot of this cheese works. I do think Adonis gets a little bit lost in the multiple subplots – the film never quite comes as clearly from his perspective as it did in the first one- and some plot points feel more like they are happening because they have to happen to get us to the next thing, rather than naturally earning them. But there’s still the strong cast – not only Jordan and Stallone, but also the wonderfully engaging Tessa Thompson as Adonis’s Girlfriend and the just plain spectacular Phylicia Rashad as his adoptive mother, pumping out wisdom and authority with every pore. Dolph Lungren is surprisingly good as the returned Drago, communicating the pain and rage of the previous decades (and pretty much embodying the term “toxic fatherhood”), and the climax feels incredibly climactic. So yes, it’s a little less well-constructed than the first film – but still, it is a pretty decent film that (damn the pun) still packs a punch.