Review of Creed II (2018) by Bertaut1 — 14 Dec 2018

Decent enough, but adheres too rigidly to the Rocky template.

After Rocky Balboa (2006) did the seemingly impossible, redeeming and concluding the franchise after the damage done by Rocky V (1990), Creed (2015) did something even more unlikely - revitalising the franchise with Rocky as a supporting character. For the sequel, Stallone is back as a writer (sharing credit with Juel Taylor, from a story by Sascha Penn and Cheo Hodari Coker), with Steven Caple Jr. directing. And whilst it hits all the beats one expects from a Rocky movie, the problem is that it hits them slavishly, and does little else.

Set 33 years after Rocky IV (1985), Ivan Drago's son Viktor (Florian Munteanu) is training as a professional boxer in Ukraine. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, three years after his professional debut, Apollo Creed's son Adonis (Michael B. Jordan) is preparing for a championship bout, unaware that the Dragos have him in their sight.

Thematically, legacy is a huge issue in Creed II, particularly as it relates to fathers and sons, examining the emotionally fraught terrain that can result when fathers try to live vicariously through their sons, and when sons must live with their father's failures.

In relation to this, the depiction of the Dragos is especially interesting. In Rocky IV, Ivan was a cartoon villain. In Creed II, he's still relatively thin as a character, but Lundgren is given enough room to portray him as essentially broken, living on nothing but bitterness, resentment, and shame. One gets the impression that from the moment of his loss he's been waiting for this, seeing his son as nothing more than the delivery method of his vengeance. Ivan has raised Viktor in pure hate, teaching him that the only thing that matters is winning, but you can see in every move that Viktor makes he's far more concerned with earning his father's respect - winning as an end unto itself means relatively little to him. There's a lot of pathos in that, and both Lundgren and Munteanu act the hell out of it.

The training montages also do something interesting in respect to Viktor. Showing him jogging through economically impoverished communities, stacking crates, lugging around bags of cement, and working with less than state-of-the-art equipment, the parallel is not to Ivan, who trained with hi-tech gizmos and gadgets in Rocky IV, but to Rocky's training in the original Rocky (1976). Indeed, whilst Adonis lives in a luxury apartment, Viktor and Ivan live in a dingy bedsit in Ukraine that recalls Rocky's original digs in Philadelphia.

The problem with all of this is that the Dragos' story is by far the most compelling one in the film. Set against the complex and fascinating Drago family drama, Creed's story is pretty insipid. And this feeds into the film's most egregious problems - its rigid adhesion to the Rocky template, and the concomitant predictability. Chances are that everything you think might happen in Creed II does, as the film makes no attempt whatsoever to be original. Aside from the Drago subplot, there is nothing here that we haven't seen before. Granted, the Rocky franchise has always tended to wear its predictability like a badge of honour, and the core template does work. But even when a film adheres to that template, one shouldn't be able to predict each narrative beat with near perfect accuracy. Even Rocky V, as awful as it was, tried something new. It didn't even remotely work, but the thinking behind it was admirable. Aside from two unexpected cameos, Creed II never once caught me off-guard, and because of that it's is interminably boring at times.

Even the boxing itself is not especially well-done. Kramer Morgenthau's cinematography is fine, but nothing special, and pales in comparison to Maryse Alberti's work in the first film. Aside from Raging Bull (1980) and Ali (2001), both visually unique in their own ways, Creed is arguably the most technically proficient boxing movie in terms of in-ring competition. Creed II, however, shoots all the fights conventionally, holding a fairly uniform three-quarters distance from the actors, with Caple Jr.'s only trick seeming to be slow-motion, which he grossly over-uses.

Although there are some laudable elements here, Creed II is a disappointment. Sure, the Rocky melodrama is there, the Rocky fights are there, the Stallone one-liners are there, but with a narrative focused almost entirely on the less interesting characters, this is a missed opportunity. Apart from the Drago subplot, everything is by-the-numbers. Yes, we care about these characters, but that's because of the previous films, and whereas Creed forged a path very much its own, Creed II returns to the overly familiar.