Creed III — Review Thread

The Drago fight in 2 was such an extreme weight difference that this one seemed tame by comparison.

Creed III(3/1/2023)
In 1984 that famed parodist "Weird Al" Yankovic wrote a parody of the song “Eye of the Tiger” called “Theme to Rocky XIII (The Rye or the Kaiser).” At the time there were only three Rocky films that had been made with a fourth one due out the next year and yet that still seemed crassly commercial enough for someone to make a joke song premised around this property being milked beyond all reason with endless sequels. Obviously the idea that they would end up making thirteen of these movies was meant to be an outrageous exaggeration when he wrote that song but… at this point it’s looking like it might be possible because this third film in the Creed spinoff series marks the ninth film in the Rocky series, which is pretty wild if you think about it. And what’s even wilder is that in the film environment of 2022 this actually feels like one of the more dignified and restrained of the film franchises out there in that it just feels like they’re making traditional sequels with numbers at the end of the titles instead of planning out extended cinematic universes or coming up with weird spinoffs of spinoffs with elaborate titles after colons. Of course I’d say that going into this third installment I was pretty skeptical about the long term prospects of the Creed movies. Creed II wasn’t “bad” exactly but it seemed like a pretty significant step down from the “original” legasequel and it wouldn’t have surprised me if they just left it there, but they have come back for a third chapter in the life of Adonis Creed and this time star Michael B. Jordan followed in Sylvester Stallone’s footsteps once again by stepping behind the camera of the series he’s spearheading for this installment.

We pick up our story a few years after the events of Creed II with Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) fighting what is billed as his final heavyweight bout, a rematch with Ricky Conlan (Tony Bellew) from the first film. He comes away from that fight victorious and announces his retirement in order to focus on his wife Bianca (Tessa Thompson) and his deaf daughter Amara (Mila Davis-Kent). Additionally he plans to focus on the gym he owns and together with trainer Tony “Little Duke” Evers (Wood Harris) intends to help manage the next generation of ring champions. Currently they’re training a prospect named Felix Chavez (José Benavidez Jr.), who’s lined up to fight Viktor Drago (Florian Munteanu) when a person from Creed’s past suddenly shows up outside the gym. This guy, Damian "Dame" Anderson (Johnathan Majors), was a promising amateur fighter that Creed knew from the foster home he grew up in and the two had been close friends before they found themselves in some trouble that Creed escaped from but which landed Anderson in prison. He’s out of prison now but feels like a successful boxing career was stolen from him and he wants Creed to help him get into the ring again. Creed is skeptical that this will work out but Anderson clearly still has some chops and a will to win, but also perhaps a hidden agenda.

Creed III opens with a flashback to 2002 where we see the start of a pivotal night in the life of Adonis Creed and Dame Anderson. The start of this flashback is set to the Dr. Dre song “The Watcher,” which proved to be something of a resonant choice to foreground in this movie as it was a song about Dre trying to reconcile his “street” image with his status as a comfortable millionaire when he came out with that second album. That is not unlike Creed’s own thematic situation in this movie where he’s now a reigning champion with seemingly nothing to prove and at the same time everything to prove as in the eyes of Anderson he’s gotten soft and has also essentially abandoned “the hood” to live a pampered life of luxury. In the parlance of Rocky III, he’s allegedly lost “the eye of the tiger.” That is, however, the film’s only real link to Rocky III or any of the other Rocky movies for that matter outside a couple of stray references and the basic formula. It was announced after Creed II that Sylvester Stallone would be retiring the Rocky character with that movie and he does keep to that promise with Creed III, which is the only Rocky-less Rocky movie to date. The film also doesn’t go back to the well with the opponent Creed fights either like they did in the last film and its links to Rocky IV. There were rumors early on that Creed would fight the son of Clubber Lang in this movie but they wisely abandoned that and decided to make this the first Creed movie that would firmly establish this as Michael B. Jordan’s franchise now and would get out of the Italian Stallion’s shadow.

And in keeping with this being Michael B. Jordan’s franchise, the actor is now in the director’s chair and while he’s no Ryan Coogler I do think he handles himself a little better than Creed II director Steven Caple Jr. did. He does occasionally try a little too hard to go for some flashy tricks, including a couple of misguided CGI shots of punches going into flesh that kind of reminded me of that one funky looking punch shot from The Matrix Revolutions. Jordan does, however, have an ace in the hole in the form of Johnathan Majors, who has some really strong screen presence as the film’s villain who is a clear improvement over Drago Jr. in the last movie and the British dude from the first Creed. At the end of the day though Anderson is mostly elevated by having an interesting motive and by Majors’ performance, in practice he doesn’t really do much of anything that a Clubber Lang or another more generic opponent wouldn’t do and basically just fits into the formula. Additionally I do think this series is at long last kind of struggling to find new ways to re-invent certain series hallmarks like training montages and opening fights, both of which feel kind of recycled here from what we got in the last couple of movies. If I were Michael B. Jordan I would maybe take a hard look at how off the rails the first Rocky series went in its fourth and fifth installments and maybe opt not to go down the same road of over-extension with his own series. That having been said, the movie he has given us is solid workmanlike entertainment that will probably leave fans of the previous two films plenty satisfied.
*** out of Five

Creed cinematic universe continues as Amazon plans live action series, animation series, and then the daughter is gonna get an origin story.

Jonathan Majors arrested for domestic assault.