ROCKY’S ROBOT: Why CREED III isn’t riffing on the sequel you think it is
Warning: This story contains spoilers for the latest Rocky film; a formulaic franchise that somehow still works after 45 years and 9 feature films.
Much like Sylvester Stallone did in writing and directing most of the ROCKY sequels you cannot help but to view an autobiographical streak in the obstacles they have chosen for these characters.
No longer the preteen defending the honor of his dead mother in a group home, nor an upper-middle class white collar worker who moonlights as an amateur boxer on the weekends, Adonis Creed is a household name in the latest sequel and a champion himself. One that director and star Michael B.Jordan labors to show his audience is also a husband, a father, a son, an entrepreneur, a fight promoter, and that his name now signifies a brand.
“My personal life and this character have been interlinked for the last nine years. It’s super weird to play a character going through the same things I’m going through.” Jordan told the LA Times. “Yes, the franchise has been one way. But this isn’t ‘Rocky.’ This is ‘Creed.’ Their experiences are going to be totally different. They look different. I live in reality.”
Though Jonathan Majors’ massive persona looms large over the marketing materials, CREED III’s true antagonist is masculinity, survivor’s guilt, and impostor syndrome. If that sounds lofty for a sports film to undertake then you might have an inkling of Michael B. Jordan’s ambition.
This is the Rocky film for fans of therapy. Try putting that pull quote on a poster!
Stallone used to begin every sequel with the last scene from the previous film as a sort of CliffNotes version of the Joseph Campbell treatise. Perhaps because modern audiences have access to cinema libraries on their phones the new film delivers an innovation: a prologue scene set twenty years in the past that colors in the unseen corners of Adonis Creed’s tragic backstory and introduces a new frenemy.
The baseline of Dr. Dre’s The Watcher places us in Los Angeles in 2002, but the lyrics are so on-the- nose they could also be describing the adult Creed. Or someone else perhaps?
I moved out of the hood for good, you blame me?
N****s aim mainly at n****s they can’t be
But n****s can’t hit n****s they can’t see
I’m out of sight, now I’m out of they dang reach
How would you feel if n****s wanted you killed?
You’d probably move to a new house on a new hill
From there the film picks up with present-day Adonis in another prize fight; a rematch against Pretty Ricky Conlan (Tony Belew), the champion staring down a prison sentence from the first Creed film. As a surrogate for his own personal legitimacy way back in 2015, Conlan is now an irrelevant foil for the conquering hero. Having outgrown him both personally and professionally, Creed makes short work of the disgraced former champion and retires from boxing.
Retires? How will Jordan (and his favorite avatar Adonis) keep the train cars of commerce running on schedule while balancing his personal responsibilities to Bianca, his daughter Amara, and, if you pull the lens back, to his community? How are we supposed to view him three films in when the character no longer qualifies as an underdog?
What mountains are left for him to climb anyway? It is the question that the producers of such sequels never answer — mainly because they pay teams of writers to do it for them. The story strains to convince us of its Importance (cultural, racial, economic) but you don’t have to squint to see that it exists purely because the market demands that it does. CREED III has the empty calorie taste of a doomed new cola fresh off of the conveyor belt that nobody asked for.
All of this is calibrated to the audience’s meritocratic sensibilities. Our modern appetite to feel privileged while consciously aware that we must be forever earning that privilege: a feat Jordan/Creed accomplishes through his gallantry and by the sheer size of the men who wish to put dents in his head.
By making Donny’s aristocratic lifestyle so stressful (his daughter is deaf and being bullied, his wife’s handicap has stripped her of her ability to perform musically, his mother has survived a recent stroke), so dependent on dexterous navigation (and devoid of Rocky’s tutelage), we are left with the feeling that perhaps Adonis actually deserved this advantage. Or maybe by the time that the training montage hits our synapses are so well-conditioned to the formulaic contours that we can’t help be swept along with them.
The preview audience I saw the film with cheered at the end. The film’s opening weekend gross surpassed expectations with $58.7 million and the top spot at the box office which is the biggest opening weekend a Rocky film has ever had.
So score that round to Jordan.
“Is this your king!?”
You may remember the memes from 2018 when Ryan Coogler’s film BLACK PANTHER reigned both the box office and the conversations being held around the film’s cultural tenor: Killmonger was right.
Coogler had created a comic book antagonist (also played by Jordan) so magnetic and so completely developed that if you didn’t give pause and consider his case then you weren’t paying attention. Halfway through Erik Killmonger hasn’t just stolen the film, he’s thrown the Black Panther out of his own movie!
“I’ve been waiting my whole life for this moment.” Killmonger tells T’Challa in a pause before combat. Killmonger, has already overcome more than the Black Panther ever will.
Killmonger was not just another disposable comic book villain as much as he is the embodiment of anyone who’s ever been discarded from the “hero’s” narrative. His personality, ideology, and behavior imbued the character with such a holistic integrity that the audience does not merely accept it but is seduced by it. Hence, the killmongerwasright hashtag.
Audiences found themselves secretly hoping that Killmonger hijack the plot. Killmonger’s maniacal (?) plan to prop up insolvent global insurgencies with futuristic weaponry was thwarted, but his moral clarity rubs off on the Black Panther as the film ends with him announcing Wakanda to the United Nations.
The Afro Futurist Bohemia cannot morally afford to keep its secrecy nor neutrality.
Assuming the mantle of the franchise from both Ryan Coogler and Sylvester Stallone, who are both producers on the latest installment, Jordan utilizes the same template to create a new antagonist, ex-con Damian “Dame” Anderson.
After defending his title a final time (this writer rolls his eyes) Creed’s retired life with his musician wife, Bianca (Tessa Thompson), and their young daughter, Amara (Mila Davis-Kent) is upended by Dame, the childhood friend from the prologue who reappears after an 18-year incarceration like a ghost. Indeed, Adonis does not even recognize him at first — Hamlet’s problem.
It helps that Dame is played by Jonathan Majors, an actor whose face is able to convey more emotions than the rest the film’s cast combined. I understand that is is might be easier to teach boxers to act than it is to teach actors to box, but neither Tony Bellew, Florian Munteanu, or Jose Luis Benavidez Jr. should head to their next audition asking for heftier sides.
“Pick yourself up for once.”
Adonis welcomes his friend home and tentatively begins to introduce him to the stratified airs of the Heavyweight Champion. At a party the mysterious ex-con presses Bianca towards an uncomfortable subject (her disability and the resentment she harbors) before she takes back the offensive. Her attempt to ply historical details from Dame regarding the blind spots in her husband’s account of his own childhood is arguably the best scene in the movie.
Thompson and Majors spar better with their pursed lips, piercing glances and posture than anything that takes place in the film’s multiple training montages. The conversation turns towards his own open wounds — and those that might overlap with her husband’s. But Dame’s gambit depends on holding some of his cards close to his broad chest: he deescalates the confrontation and tells her she should get the rest of the story from her husband.
Thompson holds her own but you suspect Majors might be pulling his punches.
Acting circles around the other actors to the point I kept thinking that Jordan, as the director, owed it to his cast to protect them from Majors making them look so bad. Any responsible management on that set would have been screaming THROW THE DAMN TOWEL! like Tony Burton does in ROCKY IV.
Fans of any IP want something familiar that doesn’t feel like pages from the Xerox machine. Challenge me with something fresh; but don’t challenge me too much. Coogler practically wrote the manual for resuscitating woebegone IP eight years ago by introducing the character of Adonis Johnson; the illegitimate son of former heavyweight champion Apollo Creed — for better or worse depending on your fondness for franchises.
The pain and pathos that Majors animates the villain with are high water marks for a 46-year-old franchise — which speaks to both the acting chops of the foils to this point (I’m looking at you Tommy Morrison), and to the concerted efforts of CREED III’s writers to inject some original ideas rather than resigning to the copypasta of pastiche.
Dame defeats an arrogant fighter whose purse strings are held by Creed. Intentionally or not, when Donny’s cash cow hits the canvas you feel no pity for him. It may be Jordan’s film, but these are the only scenes that soar. Dame is film’s true underdog.
Once in the ring he sets out to make up for lost time: sprinting around the ring in that odd, bobbish canter of his, flapping his arms up and down in the manner of a puppet who has been given a moment of unrestrained freedom. No strings on me.
“Step out of what was and step into what is.”
Jordan may be pushing against the Stallone comparisons but how are we to ignore them? It is striking that by the third film both men figured that managing their fame and success would be the logical direction for sequels to take.
The further into the stratosphere that their careers have vaulted them, the further removed they are from the Darwinian streets and alleys that fueled their journey.
In ROCKY III (1982) we learn that the hero’s preeminence is a facade and that his winning streak is the result of his manager Mickey’s curation of contenders. “What are you talkin’ about I’ve had ten title defenses?” “THAT WAS EASY!” “What do you mean ‘easy?’” “THEY WAS HAND-PICKED!”
Stallone created a visual metaphor with the ten-foot statue gifted by the city of Philadelphia of what it must look like to fail to measure up to your own myth. Jordan pays homage to this beat when his character sees a giant billboard of himself posturing as a garish clothes horse. He has no helmet to throw at himself but the disdain on his face suggests he might wish he did.
ROCKY V (1990) weaponized the same feelings of inadequacy in another Rocky protege: Tommy “The Machine” Gunn, played by boxer Tommy Morrision. Gunn’s career arc exists solely in the shadow of the heroic accomplishments of Balboa and eventually is poisoned against him in an underhanded attempt to lure Rocky back into the ring by an unscrupulous promoter.
Reluctantly at first, Rocky guides Gunn from bout to bout until he gets his own opportunity at the championship. In a montage we see press clipping that call Gunn “Rocky’s boy,” “Rocky’s robot” and even “Rocky’s clone.” The southpaw even loans out Apollos’ Uncle Sam trunks.
But Tommy Gunn is unworthy. The audience seems to recognize this before the inhabitants of the story do. The film was a failure and killed the franchise for over a decade.
Seeing Jordan rehash this scenario is another franchise precedent of life imitating art. Where Tommy Gunn wearing Apollo’s colors was blasphemous: Jordan/Adonis is equipped to stepping outside of Rocky’s shadow — a fact the film sidesteps by simply removing Stallone. We are never told where he is or what occupies his time.
(SPOILERS FOLLOW) The fact that Rocky can’t make it to Mary Anne Creed’s (Phylicia Rashad) funeral deserves a mention here, but let’s not forget Jordan and the writers also ignore her character’s two biological children. Where are they? Who are they? What was their relationship to Adonis?
The film omits their existence in the same way that it erases Rocky.
In the Donny’s showroom we see a picture of Carl Weathers throwing a punch against an invisible opponent in the flag trunks that he made famous in ROCKY. But the opponent has been framed out. That we see a white leg at the bottom right of the photo infers that he is swinging at Rocky but the large physical gap between the punch thrown and the invisible boxer is so exaggerated that it makes Apollo (and the Art Director) look foolish. Who swings that wildly anyway?
The cut-rate photoshopping lays plain the film’s intentions: It is easier to erase Stallone’s huge shadow than it is to acquiesce to his demands. The degree to which this gambit succeeds is debatable; something Jordan alludes to in addressing the Rocky-sized-hole.
“We’re in a different age.” Jordan said. “I’ve got a following that love Creed for who he is. Some of these people don’t even know who Rocky is. They’ve never seen the ‘Rocky’ movies. But they’ve seen ‘Creed.’”
“Try spending half your life in a cell watching sombody else live your life.”
Stallone wrote the first film after seeing an unknown fighter named Chuck Wepner go the distance against Muhammad Ali in 1975. Some have argued that the Rocky films are a pop appropriation and re-purposing of the cultural schism for which Ali acted as a lightning rod.
Another Great White Hope, Rocky initially overcomes the flamboyant and vocally demonstrative champion Apollo Creed before co-opting his abilities in the sequels.
In ROCKY III Apollo teaches Rocky all that he knows, and in the next film, with no further purpose, he dies. Apparently not content to vanquish the Muhammad Ali myth through the prism of Hollywood fiction, the sequels set out to erase it entirely by positioning Rocky as the better father, better husband, better boxer, and better man.
In ROCKY V Stallone again cribs notes from Ali’s life writing the character can no longer fight because doctors discover a hole in the membrane that separate the ventricles his brain. He shows Rocky suffers from trembles in the shower, perhaps the results of a lifetime of being punched in the head.
One of the many grudges that Dame holds against Adonis in CREED III is that the he appropriated his dream while erasing the memories of the one he stole it from. In a meta critique this view imbues the crisis Dame presents with both moral superiority and Shakespearean irony as if Clubber Lang and Chuck Wepner knocked on Rocky’s door one day in 1982. Or would it be Stallone’s door? We cannot know.
If by creating ROCKY Stallone stole Wepner’s story in an unconscious effort to subvert the mythology of Muhammad Ali, then it could be argued that Jordan stealing it back in 2023 is only fair.
