Oh, I did see Creed III, but that was Monday night. You can read my review here.
No, on Tuesday I night, I finally corrected the strangest oversight in any long-running movie series where I've seen the majority of the films. I finally saw Rocky II.
Yes, Rocky II came out in 1979. Yes, that was 44 years ago.
Here's how the oversight happened.
Rocky III was the movie that came out closest to when I started caring about movies. In 1982 I was still only eight for most of the year, so I didn't see it in the theater -- I'm pretty sure my parents would have thought it was too intense for an eight-year-old, and they would have been right.
But the release of Rocky III was perfectly timed to be available on The Movie Channel a few years later when we got cable. We recorded it on VHS and it quickly became one of my favorite movies, one I have probably watched close to ten times, though probably only once in the past 30 years.
At that point I went forward rather than back, catching the subsequent movies as they released. I only finally broke the chronology in 2013 -- just about a month before leaving for Australia, in fact -- when I went back and watched the original Rocky. Hard to believe that I only watched the original Rocky ten years ago, but it's true. And I gave it five stars. Really connected with me, so to speak.
You'd imagine that finally seeing Rocky would have put a viewing of Rocky II pretty urgently on my schedule, but that did not happen. I had to watch three Creed movies -- and love the first one in the same neighborhood that I loved Rocky and Rocky III -- before I finally sat down with it on Tuesday night.
I didn't finally put it on the schedule one night after seeing Creed III because that movie left me so jazzed up about boxing movies. If you checked out that review, you've seen that my reaction to Creed III was positive but on the tepid side, a somewhat generous 7/10 on ReelGood's rating scale.
Rather, I made a claim in the review I had already finished but not yet posted, which was that Rocky and Creed were the two best Rocky movies. (Rocky III figures in there somewhere for me, as the review also states, but I decided I didn't want to die on the hill of calling it the best.)
It didn't seem fair not to consider Rocky II as a candidate for that honor if I hadn't even seen it.
Well, Rocky II isn't one of my top three Rocky movies, but it did have enough going for it. Like its predecessor, it's a very gritty 1970s film. The first way I noticed this was through its title card. Not the first title card -- which does pan the title across the screen in giant letters -- but the second title card, the one you mightn't have thought was even necessary given the first one. But it looks like this:
That is, of course, not from Rocky II, but from the original Rocky. The internet was not forthcoming on the one from Rocky II.
But it looks exactly like this, though I think the lettering might have been yellow.
A very unassuming choice, especially when you are following a movie that didn't have any pretensions -- making it a justified choice in that movie -- but then blew up as a popular and critical success. A very 70s choice. A very hard hat, lunch pail, working class choice. In fact, I believe the background images are the city as shot from a moving car from a bridge, not dissimilar to the opening credits of the TV show Taxi.
In other words, a very Rocky choice.
I wasn't sure how quickly the tone of the series would pivot from what works so well in Rocky to what works so well, but is very different, in Rocky III. The answer is, pretty slowly. Rocky III is equally light on the boxing scenes, only getting to them at the beginning (establishing the series' tendency to recap what happened at the end of the last movie through exact footage from that movie) and at the end. In between, it's a lot of growing pains, early trappings of fame, mild domestic discord, and training sequences. In other words, good stuff except that Rocky already did that better than this movie could hope to, and in my mind I was hungering for something a bit more like Rocky III.
The quantity of boxing was clearly something the filmmakers sought to correct by the time of the third movie, which features not only the recap of Rocky II at the start, but also the exhibition fight against Thunderlips, the first fight against Clubber Lang, and the second fight against Clubber Lang. Boxing from start to finish is a more exciting way to grow the franchise into the new model for what blockbusters could be. Don't forget that we'd only just really started to become acquainted with this form of blockbuster four years before Rocky II with the release of Jaws, so Hollywood had not yet identified how to lather up such a movie with non-stop action.
I admit I did fall asleep several times during Rocky II -- pausing as I always do -- but that's more a commentary on me than the movie. I always fall asleep, for at least a little bit, during movies I watch at home these days. I'm sure it is impacting my overall experience in some way, but I just haven't found in my new house that perfect balance between comfort and rigidity, the kind of sitting position that keeps me awake but is also relaxing. In the old house, our coach was backed up against a wall, so when I sat on the floor leaning back on it -- my preferred viewing position -- it provided exactly what I need. In this house if I try to do that, and if no one is sitting on the couch to weigh it down, I push it backwards. So instead I sit on it, or lie on it, and well it's pretty easy to guess what will happen from there.
One thing I enjoyed about Rocky II was seeing Rocky's start as a pitchman. When he gains his fame from the bout against Apollo Creed, which he does not win in the first movie, he needless to say comes into a little bit of money, and also is sought after to hawk products. He's so bad at reading his lines, though, that he gets fired by the exasperated director. Which is just as well because he also thinks doing this is shit. He's much better at this by Rocky III.
It's interesting to note that he's also intended to be retired way back at the start of this movie, after his one fight inflicted so much damage on him that his wife Adrian can't stand to watch him continue to take a pummeling. So that means the idea of him being retired is something that was being grappled with as early as the start of the second movie ... and that his retirement doesn't actually take for the full length of five more movies.
I had wished we'd spend a little more time with Creed. Given that the last three movies in this series have borne his name and been devoted to his legacy in some way, it was useful to spend some more time with him and see how much that feels justified. Of course, in Rocky II he is still just basically a villain, even baiting Rocky to fight him again with cheap insults in the newspaper. In this movie, he's the one living in the fancy house, insecure about his standing within boxing and the controversial result of his fight with Rocky. Creed wouldn't become the beloved figure so mourned in the three Creed movies until Rocky III, and then of course especially in Rocky IV, so seeing him here really wasn't that instructive.
There's also a long sub plot about Adrian going into a coma while she's pregnant -- at least I think I've got that right. This is where I was dozing off a bit.
I did find the final fight pretty rousing, but I realized I already knew its main beats -- from the start of Rocky III. So yeah, I'd already seen Rocky over-punch on his last swing of the match, leading him to lose his balance as both he and Apollo fall to the mat at the same time. Only Rocky gets up. It's a sufficiently epic climax to a boxing match, but I'd already seen it so it didn't hold any surprise for me.
I say that I have now completed the Rocky series, but is that really true?
Apparently, it is not true.
Although I said Creed III was the time to end things in my review, that may have been more wishful thinking than Hollywood reality. Perhaps I thought Michael B. Jordan et al would show the restraint that previous Rocky movies have never shown, even though I had no reason to assume that. I mean, Adonis Creed is actually retired at the start of Creed III. Perhaps I didn't think it was possible for two different Creed movies to start with him as retired, because it would just be too silly. Then again, when has a character being too old ever stopped Hollywood before? We're preparing for the next Indiana Jones movie this summer.
But yes, Michael B. Jordan has confirmed -- perhaps hot off the box office success of this movie -- that Creed IV is already in the works. It's true there are storylines they have not yet explored. Spoilers for Creed III, but Adonis Creed has not yet lost a fight while holding the championship belt. In other words, he hasn't had his Rocky III lowest moment.
So all I can say is that I'm a Rocky Cinematic Universe completist for now. Who knows, maybe the only way for Adonis to fully shake off the baggage of his father and his former trainer is to end up appearing in more RCU movies than either of them.
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