Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) hopes to prove he’s not
making a mistake following in his father’s footsteps. Similarly, Creed hopes to prove it’s not a mistake
to make another Rocky movie. Adonis’s
old man was legendary boxer Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), who years ago fought
Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) and became his friend. Creed, Sr. died in the
ring before his son, the result of an affair, was born. Now the young man, who
bounced around the foster care system before being taken in by his dead father’s
widow (Phylicia Rashad), is out to become a great boxer on his own. So both the
movie and its lead character could be held back by impossible expectations and
audience skepticism: the sixth sequel to an Oscar-winning introduction to an iconic
character, and the son of a champion looking to excel in the very arena that
made his father famous. You could be excused for thinking they’d both be
coasting on past glories and fans’ lingering affections for earlier triumphs.
But writer-director Ryan Coogler had other ideas, playing off resonances of the
past and building on sturdy genre tropes to make a solid, exciting movie worthy
of its predecessor’s legacies.
It’s a glossy boxing picture, the kind where even the grit
and grain in Maryse Alberti’s cinematography is pretty. It hauls out every
cliché: training montages, downbeat hardships, a hotshot rival, crusty old
coaches, and sad diagnoses for not one but two supporting characters. And yet,
it works. Coogler, whose Fruitvale
Station, a clear-eyed and intimate last-day-in-the-life of a victim of
police violence (also starring Jordan), was one of the most notable debut films
in recent memory, brings Creed a
grounding in emotional realities. Adonis, hoping to get an anonymous start in
the sport, moves to Philadelphia to train, slowly coaxing Rocky himself to be
his trainer. He doesn’t want to use his father’s name, but he’s eager to
befriend someone who really knew the man. Scenes between Jordan and Stallone
are exceptionally tender, mixed with a macho joking and jostling. They quickly
come to care for one another, each giving their new friend reasons to push
themselves to be better. Their dynamic is hardly surprising, but likable
nonetheless.
It’s smart to position Rocky as the coach, allowing the
franchise’s past to recede into the background as old memories informing the
present realities. It’s tied to events of his previous films – we get direct
references, through dialogue, props, photos on the wall, and footage of old
matches, to every single one of them – but it’s no longer his story, although he gets several terrifically moving scenes. He’s not to around the recapture his former glory. He's here
to help train a new guy. Though it’s at times almost impossibly pinned in by
demands of fan service and genre formula, Coogler, with co-writer Aaron
Covington, spins out of those traps by giving the movie over to Creed, whose
ambition and appeal lead him into the usual early bouts and steadily improving
training all leading up to a high-profile offer to participate in a match with a
current reigning champion (actual pro boxer Tony Bellew). Well-worn tropes are invigorated
with exceptionally well-directed scenes, stirring long takes that dance through
the ring holding tight on the athletes, or quick, crisp wham-bang punchy
editing hammering home the hits, and observant close-ups for soft dialogue in
fine dramatic beats between the main events.
Echoes of Rocky are
here in the structure, right down to the lovely halting romance with a sweet
Philly woman (Tessa Thompson), but Coogler deftly, confidently flips its racial politics in a satisfying, unspoken representation-centered way, as Jordan takes the center and makes the film his own. He commands the
screen with his charisma, his striking physicality and believable punches
mixing with a vulnerability, a neediness, a desire to prove himself motivating
every action, from a sweet first date to a brutal final fight. Well-acted across
the board, the ensemble is fine-tuned to the mumbling rhythm of people who
aren’t eloquent speakers, but are effective communicators nonetheless, people
who know how to express themselves through their body language, through small
gestures. Coogler makes great use of their presences, a combination of megawatt
youthful star power – Jordan and Thompson are charming and intensely
sympathetic – and wistful legacy – Stallone, every bit the past-his-prime
legend for whom people still have affection, and Rashad, easy enough to believe
as a beloved maternal presence whose famous husband did her wrong.
Coogler’s evident love for the genre and the series helps.
He knows how to work it, jabbing at the audience with emotional manipulation,
amping up the visceral responses with whomping violence in the ring, and using
both subtle and obvious Rocky iconography
to goose the nostalgic elements without taking away from the story’s own
stand-alone potential. Perhaps the best example of this is the stirring use of Bill
Conti’s famous “Gonna Fly Now” melody, teased throughout Ludwig Goransson’s
score, then triumphantly unveiled in full at a key climactic moment. It matches
the crescendo of the picture, a slow, confident build through expected beats to
arrive at an end that’s unexpectedly involving. Somehow both familiar and
fresh, this is a fantastically crowd-pleasing movie, mostly what you’d think
you’ll get from a boxing picture, especially in its tense final rounds, but
elevated by the exceptional craft: smartly structured, movingly acted,
confidently directed. That it works so well is no mistake. It’s what you get
when talented people know what they’re doing with the legacy they’ve been
charged with extending.
