Creed III (2023)

Directed by Michael B. Jordan. Starring Michael B. Jordan, Jonathan Majors, Tessa Thompson, Wood Harris, Phylicia Rashad, Mila Davis-Kent, José Benavidez Jr., Florian Munteanu. [PG-13]

Adonis Creed has retired from boxing and is acting as a manager/promoter when a childhood friend, Damian (Majors), shows up, a once-promising fighter who has spent the last couple decades in prison. The ex-con is hungry for a shot at the title, and Adonis feels guilty and beholden enough to help him out, underestimating the chip on Damian’s shoulder. As in the Rocky franchise, this second sequel is mostly more of the same, building up a new opponent for Creed and throwing a gratuitous subplot or two to recurring cast members (Tessa Thompson is wasted as bad as Talia Shire was in the later Rocky pictures). Michael B. Jordan steps into the director’s chair for the first time, and while he demonstrates confidence and handles the character scenes satisfactorily, the boxing matches and montages could use a little work—the camera moves freely, and the sequences are constructed and edited with dramatic style, but as often as not, when they’re not rehashing old techniques from the Rocky movies, they’re indulging heavy-handed metaphors, like when both fighters face down mirrors during training or when the boxing ring is visualized as a literal cage. Although unlikely to disappoint fans of the series, some of the things those earlier pictures handled as reliable formula elements are mishandled here—because of the stakes and the personal history between the opponents, the climactic bout should be a monumental match, so why does the build-up and the fight itself feel so curiously rushed? Sitting this one out onscreen as Rocky Balboa, Sylvester Stallone is missed, but he’s listed as one of the producers.

57/100