I am an unabashed super fan of the Rocky series. The original 1976 is a go-to feel-good movie for me that I can watch anytime, anywhere. I’m so stupid when it comes to this franchise that I’ll even go to bat for Rocky V unironically. Creed is possibly my favorite film of the 21st Century. That movie hit for me not just because it was a wonderful legacy sequel to the Rocky movies, but it also just worked entirely as its own thing. By the end of the movie I cared as much about Adonis Creed as I did about Rocky Balboa, which is a thing that a lot of these franchise resurrections fail to do.
The sequel to Creed is the epitome of “okay.” The script, by Sylvester Stallone himself (and co-writer Juel Taylor), is very much just playing the hits. It’s basically just Rocky III and IV mashed together, right down to having Ivan Drago find multiple ways to say variations of “I must break you.” The main thing that film got right was Rocky’s ending. I don’t need to see Rocky Balboa die on screen. I don’t really want to see Rocky anymore at all. I love Rocky Balboa. He’s probably my favorite character in all of cinema, and having his story end with him retiring to be a grandpa is the perfect capper.
I bring all that up because Creed III seems to also have the same exact idea with regard to moving on from the Rocky shadow. It’s a film that is doing everything it can to not rely only on being a Rocky sequel, right down to barely mentioning the man in the film at all. So after Creed II was kind of a middling mashup of stuff we’ve already seen before, Creed III goes in an entirely different direction.
After becoming the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world (in a title fight against his Creed opponent “Pretty” Ricky Conlan), Adonis officially retires from boxing to become a fight promoter and manager, as well as spend time with his wife and daughter. After a brief period of domestic bliss he’s faced with a blast from his past – his former best friend and foster brother Damian is back in town after spending 18 years in prison and looks to reconnect with Adonis. Damian was a golden glove youth boxer when he and Adonis were still kids, up until an incident involving Damian pulling a gun on someone resulted in him going to prison. Donnie had repressed his feelings about this and his time in foster care for years, but Damian’s return brings all of those emotions and trauma back to the surface. Feeling like he owes Damian, he gets him hooked up at his gym as a sparring partner for the fighters he’s managing. When a heavyweight boxer (Baby Drago from Creed II) gets injured before a title fight that Donnie is promoting, he decides to replace him with Damian, mirroring Donnie and Rocky’s ascension to the title. After Damian wins the title, the two men have a massive falling out, causing Donnie to come out of retirement for one last fight to take on Damian in what can only be described as a couple’s therapy session by way of brain trauma.
Creed III is directed by Michael B Jordan, his feature debut, which is pretty fitting since four of the Rocky movies were directed by Stallone himself. There’s a history of the star taking over behind the camera. Still heavily involved is Ryan Coogler, director and writer of the first Creed film, credited as a producer and he gets a story by credit for the screenplay. Jordan doesn’t merely ape Ryan Coogler’s style (or the visual styles of Stallone or John G. Avildsen), instead putting his own stamp on the film series. There are a lot of anime inspired sequences in the film, with the two fighters having unique styles and their hardest punches are emphasized in borderline cartoonish ways. There is also a lot of impressionistic imagery throughout the finale of the film. Basically the entire final fight is done in a style that shoves a ton of loaded imagery into the periphery, causing the fighters to battle not just each other but the ghosts of their past.1 It’s kind of incredible to witness a first time director come in to a series this established and just throw caution to the wind and take huge swings like this against the grain. There’s also a lot of subtle details in the film – little setups and payoffs that don’t get in your face to wink at the audience or show off how clever they are, like a brief bit of shadowboxing by Damian and references to Muhammad Ali that culminate in Donny mimicking Ali’s famous pose over Sonny Liston.
Creed III works so well as its own movie. It’s almost an outright standalone piece with how little it relies on the previous films and focuses on telling its own story. These characters have complete arcs that begin and end without spending most of the runtime setting up sequels. There’s a complete story being told within the two hour runtime which is somehow no longer the norm for entries in a modern film series. Honestly, you could watch Creed III without having seen any of the previous movies and you’ll pretty much fully understand what’s going on and barely miss a thing outside of minor details. Hell, they don’t even play “Gonna Fly Now” this time around.
Less successful than Jordan’s direction is Creed III’s screenplay. The central hook is a very clever play on this series’s traditional narrative — “what if the down on his luck boxer getting his shot at the big time was the bad guy?” — and there are a lot of strong moments littered throughout, but on a moment to moment basis it doesn’t quite click together. The film’s second act feels rushed, sprinting through a gamut of character beats that could have afforded a bit more time to flesh out. Things like Donnie’s relationship with Bianca and their daughter don’t land as hard as the Donnie/Damian material does. Bianca has her own story going on in the periphery, having retired to become a music producer in order to preserve what hearing she has left, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. The storyline involving Creed’s adoptive mother’s declining health has its moments, but it mostly lands with a thud. It just feels like, at times, the story doesn’t quite have enough time to let all of the narrative threads cohere and it could have afforded some more time for character moments to breathe.
What makes most of this material work anyway is the strong performances. Michael B. Jordan continues to be incredible in this role as Adonis. He’s got an effortless charisma. He’s charming. He’s funny. He’s everything you could want out of the leading man, but he’s also got a vulnerability and an ability to tap into some deep sadness and heartache with his character. On the opposite side, Jonathan Majors is spectacular as Damian. It’s a tricky role, as he’s required to thread a very tight needle of being simultaneously a sympathetic antagonist and an outright heel. There are moments where he’s channeling Clubber Lang in terms of just being an undeniable piece of shit, but it’s always couched in this darkness and brokenness. Even when he’s being awful, you still can’t help but be drawn to him. The movie could not work without Majors’s performance because the entire third act revolves around the audience wanting to see Donnie beat the hell out of Damian while simultaneously still hoping that the two can mend their relationship.
If you asked me where Creed III would land in my pantheon of Rocky movies, I wouldn’t put it at the tippy-top next to either Creed or the first Rocky film, but I feel comfortable saying it is firmly in that next tier down alongside Rocky III and Rocky Balboa. After the onslaught of nostalgia baiting of the previous film, Creed III was such a breath of fresh air.
- I’ve got to give a shout out to my colleague Reinier who described part of the final fight as being inspired by the two men play sequence in Ang Lee’s Hulk, which is a spot on comparison.
