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'Creed' Is As Good As 'Rocky', But Not As Entertaining

Creed is a first-rate boxing movie, a worthy spin-off from Sylvester Stallone’s 1977 classic Rocky. But for a number of reasons, despite what some reviewers are saying, it isn’t as good as Rocky, or at least not as entertaining.

 

 

The primary reason is that, largely for legitimate reasons, Creed lacks the high-spirited romanticism of the original. Stallone is entirely convincing as Rocky, but Rocky is an old man now, and most of the old juice is quite realistically gone. The love of his life, Adrian, is dead, and Rocky seems to be more involved in the restaurant in her name than in the boxing world: when he drops in at the club, he is greeted as an occasional visitor everybody hopes will come back some day. The club, like the restaurant, is thriving. Nowhere does the desperation of poverty that was important to the mood of Rocky appear in Creed, and that somehow trivializes a story that we are not invited to take very seriously in the first place.

 

Hollywood movies never invite us to question the conventional motive of wanting the bright lights of stardom, but in Creed, Phylicia Rashad’s remarks about the last years of Rocky’s late rival Apollo Creed are graphic enough to raise questions about his son, Michael B. Jordan’s insistence on being a boxer in honor of his father. But Stallone is too easily persuaded to teach him the art of the knockout, and girlfriend Tessa Thompson knows her place too well to oppose the plan.

 

Everybody performs beautifully, but the love story is a little tepid compared to Rocky and Adrian in the original, and the characters are generally more realistic and subdued. Creed remains a much better movie than the general run; but it’s not a classic like Rocky.

 

Did we have a right to expect it to be?