Speaking honestly, I can’t say that I was ever a fan of the old Rocky movies. I have really only seen the original (which is great) and the fourth one where he won the Cold War (which is silly). I have, however, seen all of the Creed films, movies that act as spin-offs or sequels depending on how you look at them. To date, they’ve been fairly entertaining movies, digging into the character of Adonis Creed in ways that I have found to be at least as interesting as anything going on in the ring, and possibly a bit deeper than Sylvester Stallone did in some of the lesser Rocky sequels. However, while the Rocky movies often had Stallone himself in the director’s chair, the Creed movies have had a different director for each installment following original directory Ryan Coogler’s move to take on Marvel’s Black Panther franchise.
All that is to say that lead actor Michael B Jordan directed this one, a factor that this installment has in common with the old Rocky films, but it also tossed the fantastic Jonathan Majors into the antagonist role. This could be something special.
Life seems good for Adonis Creed (Jordan). He’s retired from boxing a champ, and in the three years since, he’s been managing up-and-comers including the current champ (José Luis Benavidez Jr.). But then the unexpected comes into his life in the form of childhood friend Damien “Dame” Anderson (Majors), himself a former Golden Gloves champ who dreamed of going pro and becoming the champion of the world before an arrest sent him to prison for nearly twenty years. Adonis was there at the time and managed to escape the cops, but the joy of seeing his old friend turns sour quickly. While Adonis has something good going with wife Bianca (Tessa Thompson) and his adorable deaf daughter Amara (Mila Davis-Kent), Dame wants a shot at the championship, something of a tall order for a man who is older than Adonis, has never boxed professionally, and really has no options open even as Adonis sets him up as a sparring partner for current champ Felix.
The thing is, Dame is a lot more devious than he initially appears to be, something that Adonis’s mother (Phylicia Rashad) and longtime trainer Duke (Wood Harris) both recognize but that Adonis just doesn’t see. Dame is a crafty man both in and out of the ring, and he is as ruthless in his desire to have everything Adonis has as he is a good boxer. The only way to stop him from ruining more lives is for Adonis, long out of practice, to train himself up, get in the ring, and beat his former friend. Can Adonis do that while confronting the demons of his past?
There’s a lot going on here, and Adonis Creed’s complicated legacy has always been one of the bigger aspects of these movies that make them work as well as they do. Having a troubled past while trying to live up to the legacy of a father he never knew has generally made him a more complicated figure in many ways. That plays out here as the movie looks at facets of his childhood that he’d thought he’d moved past but can’t because Dame is very much a representation of that past. His guilt over what happened, even though it was arguably not his fault, say a lot about why he does many of the things he does for Dame until he realizes the extent of Dame’s machinations.
But as far as Jordan’s directorial work, there are some nice shots in here that suggest Dame is really just a dark reflection of Adonis even before Dame’s true intentions become clear. The training montage, showing the two men preparing in their own unique styles, often shows them engaged in similar activities while the lighting changes shows which one is the “good” fighter and which one is “evil”. That continues into the fight scenes, and while this isn’t a subtle movie, I don’t think any movie in this entire franchise could be said to be subtle. I will say the fight scene at the end does largely work, but I don’t think any of these movies, even going back to Rocky, ever showed the energy that Coogler did in the first Creed. However, there is this underlying idea that Adonis is just a good man trying to do right by others, to the point where this movie showed he is now on friendly terms with Creed II‘s Viktor Drago. I actually rather like that in that it shows that in many cases, Adonis doesn’t carry his conflict outside of the ring. Regardless, this was another fine entry in this series.
Grade: B
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