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I went to the cinema this afternoon. The trailer for The 300 is great btw, if your sole criteria for good cinema is heavily muscled men with naked torsos hurting one another, which mine might well be, given that my guilty pleasure for today was going to see Rocky Balboa, sixth and last of the Rocky films.
Buoyed up by good reviews and the fact that having like most people grown up with the other Rocky films I knew I’d want to see this one at some point, I thought “why not now?”. And in those terms, I really enjoyed it, and it’s a much more fitting end to the franchise than the severely misjudged Rocky V. Stallone looks right for the part, big enough and clumsy enough to come across as believable, and always threatening but never quite managing to break through the character’s inarticulacy.
It’s not brilliant, and it’s doing anything that surprising with either the characters or the format, but simply by attempting to go back to the basics of the first film and not completely fouling it up it succeeds, and sent me home again merrily humming that theme tune. Surely I wasn’t the only one tempted by Rocky’s last hurrah?
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Nostalgia aside, as much as I enjoyed this take on the character, and I wouldn’t want them to have written it any differently, I do wish they’d done it just that little bit better. Whether intentionally or not, some of the lighting is just too harsh in places, the film too slick and surface-based, and it creates this very jarring effect in a film so focused on looking at old-fashioned values.
Paulie is great as the cruel, racist old man so choked with bitterness that he doesn’t want to revisit the past, and with that being the main theme of the film so doing helps to weigh down the soaring hopes of the main character. Geraldine Hughes’ character also has a relatively strong role as someone remaining proud despite reduced circumstances, but there’s a weird admission that she believes that it’s only people who are able to physically prove their authenticity/strength that get to stay proud, which sits at odds with the rest of her character and gives the film an extra layer of masculine prejudice. Rocky, believing and eventually being counselled that he has to stay true to what he is, a fighter, is (predictably) never able to move beyond the idea that this actually means stepping into the crucible of the boxing ring.
The weakest part of the film is the dynamic between Rocky and his opponent. Pretty much because there isn’t one. Perhaps appropriate for a film even more than the others where it’s Rocky vs. himself, there just isn’t the same opposition between Rocky and an iconic villain, no symbolic challenge, say, of Rocky (Passion) versus the big Russian boy (Machine). Despite a reasonable amount of screen-time, we’re not given a chance to develop either respect or even admiration for Dixon, but at the same time no real dislike for him either, he exists in the film nebulously, his values remain untested and unclear, very much in opposition to Rocky’s side of the film. There’s also really no reason for the audience to want Rocky to land those big “hurtin’ bombs” on Dixon save a vague sense of loyalty. Which is a shame really, as even at the most basic level of wanting to see one last Rocky victory, there’s an odd lack of motivation. About the closest you get is that Rocky represents authentic, proven value, and Dixon is the modern boxer caught between his image and his untested worth, but that's stretching it.
The conclusion is also a bit disappointing. Returning to the format of a training scene before the big fight, the shots of Rocky are oddly curtailed, and there’s only a little sense that he’s pushing himself more than he’s had to before. There’s no departure from the basic “Rocky gradually gets over whatever he’s angsting about” training routine, and that more interesting choice of Rocky seriously struggling ignored, there’s also not very much hero-of-the-ring-porn that suckers like me could watch a good 10 minutes more of. Also pretty much dispensed with (arty visuals aside) is the plot-point in the other films that Rocky is meant to be under threat of severe brain-damage.
Going back to the format of the first film with Rocky as a plucky underdog (for different reasons obviously) against a vastly superior opponent was a good move, and fair play to the film, I was genuinely on the edge of my suit wanting to know how they would end it. What I actually thought they might do early on would be to have Rocky prove his strength against a worthy opponent and then, coming up against his physical limits, get the snot punched out of him. If they’d played it right, it would have been really good to see Rocky passing the torch to another fighter who was able to prove his worth against what was left of Rocky’s determination. They didn’t do that, and the split decision they do go with is a sketchy compromise that leaves Rocky really no different that at the start of the film, which given this is the last film of the franchise, feels like a bit of a wasted opportunity.
The other option that I suppose technically they did, would be to show Rocky undergoing some sort of cathartic release of his loss and anger, emptying himself of whatever that need to prove oneself physically is, but which they never really successfully portrayed. As it is, Rocky does his stuff and his determination remains intact in the face of all probability, when it would have been much more interesting if he’d had to change or they’d managed to better actually show that inner confrontation with the “stuff in the basement”. Seeing the eternally good-hearted Rocky genuinely confront his demons would at the least have been a change for the character. So like I said, I liked it, but I though they could have made braver choices if they wanted to make a “serious” Rocky film, or just said the hell with it and done a full-on Rocky is unstoppable retro-fest and have him actually win. As it is, while it’s a good conclusion to the series, it doesn’t really travel very far from the basic cycle the other films used, and it’s not quite as interesting an ending as we might have hoped for. |
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