Creed II - Review Thread

***Spoilers Spoilers Spoilers***


Can we spend a couple minutes discussing what might be the weirdest 'cameo' in modern movies?

Creed II is obviously about Adonis Creed fighting Viktor Drago, son of Ivan who famously killed Apollo in Rocky IV. Ivan is a Gold Medalist, pride of Russia and married to Brigitte Nielsen, also real-life ex-wife of Sylvester Stallone. I can't remember the last time I saw Brigitte Nielsen in anything but I do know she was in Celebrity Rehab and she was also in the tabloids over the past few months because she just had a baby in her mid-50s (I'm not kidding).

So throughout the movie there's a little back and forth between Ivan and Viktor with Ivan telling his son 'after I lost your country cast me out....and so did your mother' clearly demonstrating that both Ivan and Viktor have abandonment issues. One day some top Russian brass has both of them over for a nice dinner and who shows up to see her son after so many years? Hello Brigitte Nielsen. It's such a weird moment because in the movie it's kind of a big deal when she shows up but Nielsen isn't really a movie star and it was a weird element to bring into the movie. She doesn't have any lines, probably so they didn't have to pay her as much, but she shows up at the dinner and at the end fight, just in time for Viktor to watch her walk out of the arena as he's getting his ass kicked by Adonis thus completing the abandonment arc. It's such a strange angle in the movie and it doesn't not work, it's just a strange foray into nostalgia for Rocky IV which this movie already had.

Anyways, Creed II is a perfectly fine installment in the Rocky/Creed franchise. It's Rocky III with Rocky IV characters and hits all the bases that you expect it to hit. Stallone again is great as Rocky Balboa and Michael B. Jordan once again knocks it out of the park. It's not the best the franchise has to offer but it delivers exactly how you hope it would. That right there makes it worth the price of admission.

Creed II(12/29/2018)

Making yet another Rocky movie in 2015 certainly seemed like a crazy idea at the time, in no small part because I thought that trying to bring it back in 2006 was also kind of silly, and for that matter the decision to make the very first Rocky sequel back in 1979 was kind of suspect. And yet, the movie Creed pretty effectively proved me wrong. That spinoff about the son of Apollo Creed seeking out Rocky to be his trainer was a clear critical and financial hit and I think its success probably says less about how much life was still in the series than it does about what bringing in new talent can do to revitalize a franchise. That new talent was Ryan Coogler, a director who was plainly a better visual stylist than Sylvester Stallone and John G. Avildsen ever were but who did maintain an understanding of the series and why people loved it. There were limits to my personal enthusiasm for it, I thought it was a very solid movie that achieved what it set out to do very well, but I wasn’t one of the people claiming it was some kind of outrage when it wasn’t a Best Picture nominee. Still, the movie was a clear win and given that this franchise pretty much can’t be stopped it seemed inevitable that it would keep on going from there. Unfortunately for the sequel, Ryan Coogler was too busy making Black Panther and generally taking over Hollywood to direct the sequel, so a relatively untested young filmmaker named Steven Caple Jr. has taken his place. Can he continue to elevate the franchise with Creed II?

This sequel begins a few years after Creed and in that time Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) has come into his own as a fighter and as the film is opening he’s winning a championship fight bout without too much trouble against a complacent champion who’s past his prime. After the fight he proposes to Bianca Taylor (Tessa Thompson) and the two begin planning for their future. However, on the other side of the world in the Ukraine another fighter named Viktor Drago (Florian Munteanu) has been training with his father Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), the same Ivan Drago who killed Apollo Creed in the ring in Rocky IV, and they have been waiting for Adonis to become the champion so they can challenge him and use the likelihood that he would accept such a fight in order to find their way into the boxing spotlight. Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone), who feels a great deal of guilt over what happened to Apollo in that fight thirty years earlier, believes that accepting this fight would be a major mistake and that stirring up this old emotions is not worth whatever sense of family redemption this fight would offer. Adonis, however, does not heed this advice and accepts the fight.

When I first heard that they were planning to incorporate Ivan Drago’s son into this sequel I thought it was a terrible idea, in part because Rocky IV is a very stupid movie rooted in empty Cold War era patriotism and going out of its way to acknowledge its existence within the series continuity seemed like trouble. To the movies credit they do manage to make the Dragos feel relatively grounded and do a pretty good job of just ignoring the part where that movie implied that Rocky singlehandedly brought down the Soviet Union through his inspiring performance in the ring. That said, its occasional attempts to humanize the Dragos and make them into characters unto themselves do fall flat for the most part. The film tries to establish that the two of them have a well-earned chip on their shoulder because of the way Ivan was abandoned by the Soviet propaganda machine after his loss to Rocky, but they depict this in rather broad ways and I kind of hated a device they used involving Drago’s ex-wife. It also doesn’t help that Dolph Lundgren has proven to be a much less interesting and resilient actor than Sylvester Stallone and that the dude they found to play Viktor was an athlete chosen for his physical prowess rather than his acting abilities.

Despite all the invocations of Rocky IV, the film actually more closely follows the formula of Rocky III. After Creed accepts the fight and tries to train without Rocky the big fight begins before we’re even at the half-way point and you’d pretty much have to be an idiot not to guess that this first fight isn’t going to go very well for Adonis. So, much like when Rocky went up against Clubber Lang before him Adonis finds himself as the pampered champion underestimating his foe and having to find a way to regain the eye of the tiger after an embarrassing defeat. That is generally the problem with this movie, it’s undeniably formulaic and feels like a retread. Of course the first Creed also mirrored a lot of stuff from the original Rocky but it felt like it was adding a bit more of its own flavor, in part because Adonis Creed felt like more of a distinct character in that film. Here Adonis straight up just feels like nothing more than a younger and slightly more articulate Rocky Balboa. The film does rub up against a slightly original idea of having Rocky question whether Adonis really “needs” to fight this guy and Adonis does seem to be swayed by this and mature out of all this toxic masculinity trap… but this is a Rocky movie so we can’t actually have our hero back down from a final fight so they just sort of throw all that out at a certain point and go along with the formula.

All that having been said the boxing scenes kind of save the movie. Actually there’s plenty to criticize there as well. Michael B. Jordan looks way more like a light heavyweight (the weight class he was fighting in in the first movie) than a heavyweight and I have my doubts about any state athletics commissions allowing a fight between him and the plainly much larger Drago. Also things happen in the ring which are just kind of nuts (the final round in particular has to be the longest three minutes in temporal history) and nothing is as strong as the fights from the first Creed, but despite all that the film’s close up and impactful pugilism is still pretty enjoyable. That’s the thing about this movie, it kind of works in spite of itself. I maintain that it feels way more like the old Rocky sequels than Creed (something that probably has a lot to do with that fact that Stallone is once again writing), but… as dumb as those movies got most of them were kind of fun in spite of themselves as well. Still, I don’t have a very good feeling about this series going forward. I’m sure there will be a third film but I do hope they don’t get it in their heads to make five Creed movies like they did five (well, six) Rocky movies and that they heed this film’s lessons about avoiding the mistakes of the past more than Adonis does.

*** out of Five