Punch Drunk

Todays date is February 28th 2016 and in mere hours from the time of this post the 88th Academy Awards will take place in Beverly Hills. This year has been mired in controversy regarding the alledged whitewash in regards to all of the nominees in every major catagory and it is going to be very interesting to see how host Chris Rock is going to handle the matter.

All of that aside I have tried to watch as many of the nominated movies as I can in order to best assess which ones best deserve an Oscar in my humble opinion. With that in mind I got round to watching Creed and here for what its worth is what I thought of the latest offering from the world of Rocky Balboa.

Its been a rocky (pun intended) road for Slyvester Stallones Balboa with the first installment seeing the light of day in the year of my birth 1976. Over the course of the following 40 years there have been a further 6 films (including Creed that is) during which we have followed the rags to riches to rags story of Rocky as he challenged for and won the world heavyweight championship of the world against foe turned friend Apollo Creed. We felt the pain of each blow from Clubber Lang as Rocky was once again taken to the limit, we cried when Apollo was killed in the ring by Ivan Drago and we all face palmed when Rocky delivered hsi anti coldwar message after avenging his fallen comrades honor.

We started to lose the will to continue following Rockys story as he trained and then had a street fight with Tommy Gunn (all while dealing with Father/Son issues with Rocky Balboa Jr, played by his real life son Sage) and we wondered just who gave the greenlight to the frankly ludicrous plot that we had delivered to us in Rocky Balboa. All of which brings us to what we are led to believe will be Stallones last ever outing as Rocky as he passes the torch on to Michael B Jordan who in this film plays Adonis Johnson.

So the film begins with a young Adonis who is in a detention centre for troubled youngsters and we see him getting into a fight which of course is the movies way of demonstrating that this is a lad with some boxing potential though of course he is on the wrong side of the law. Dont worry though as the Fresh Princes Aunt Viv turns up as Mary Anne Creed, widow of the aforementioned Apollo who it turns out is Adonis' father after having had an affair but dying before the baby was born. Anyhow Mary does the decent thing and takes Adonis into her home and we then jump forward to the present day where we find Adonis boxing in Mexico where he is undefeated. He wins his fight and then we move back to LA where he quits his day job and tracks down Rocky to try and convince him to train him. Rocky is busy running his bar Adrians and doesnt want a bar of training anyone even when he discovers that Adonis is the son of his long dead friend.

Long story short Rocky of course changes his mind and takes Adonis under his wing, this becomes even more important when Adonis is challenged to a fight by the current champion which is nice and convenient when you think about it. Rocky has a fight of his own to deal with however when he is diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma which is a tad unfortunate although Rocky takes it all in his stride as he sees it as an opportunity to be reunited with his deceased wife Adrian.

So from here Rocky gets sicker and sicker as they lay increasingly more intense makeup on Stallone to make him look like hes on the way out whilst Adonis goes through the obligitory training montage to prepare him for a fight which should of course be beyond him.

Al of which brings us to the fight which goes 12 rounds (it wouldnt be much of a movie if it didnt) all coming to an end when Adonis knocks the champ down but he beats the ten count by one second to maintain his hold on the gold.

Now if all of the above sounds a tad familiar then dont worry youre not alone in that summisation as it was the exact feeling I got watching Creed as for me it suffers from the same issues as The Force Awakens in that it is nothing more than a glorified remake of its original source material, in this case Creed is little more than Rocky 1.5. Our protagonist is an unknown boxer who has potential but needs training to get them to the promise land. Whilst in the midst of their training they are challenged to a fight by a boxing champion who they have no business getting into the ring with, completely foregoing the whole qualification process that any real boxer has to subject themselves to. All of which leads to a fight where the underdog hero gets battered by the champ until midway through the battle when they turn the tide and look like they may actually pull it off and win the title. They come up short however in a dramatic climax which pushes the realms of believeablity, in Rocky it was the two fighters both hitting the canvas at the same time whilst in Creed we get the last second beating of the count by the champ.

Not that this makes Creed a bad film its just that it leaves the viewer with a massive sense of dejavu (exactly the same issue I had with Star Wars 7) as the film really offers nothing new. Now I realise that the argument will be that there is only so much that you can do in a boxing movie but over the course of the previous 6 films there was something of a complete story arc for our hero regardless of how stupid it got towards the end. Now if there really is n owhere else to go then I would make the case for not bothering as frankly there are enough remakes/reboots and pointless sequels in the world without flogging a dead horse like the Rocky franchise.

Some will point to this film being different by virtue of the performance given by Stallone and the apparent end to the Balboa involvement in the series and it is a performnce that has seen the actor win a Bafta and be nominated for an Oscar in the catagory of Best Supporting Actor. Now is this a good performance? Well its OK but does it really offer anything new or different from Stallone? The answer to that question is a resounding NO as here he is simply playing himself which we have seen plenty of times before. To put it into context I would compare this performance to Arnold Schwarzenegger who has also carved out a career for himself playing the same role in pretty much everything he has starred in and yet in the movie Maggie he blew me away by displaying range and an actual ability to act.

Stallone aside the other main actor here is obviously Michael B Jordan who does a good job of rescuing his career from the carwreck that was Fantastic Four. That said its performance here is nothing special its simply meh, looking better than it is against the by the numbers acting of Stallone.

In closing this film is OK but the sense of History Repeating cannot be ignored and because of the fact the we have seen it all before I cant give Creed anymore than an average 6 out of 10.