Creed: Rocky rebooted

There's always a danger in returning to cultural touchstones that mattered to us when we were younger. Age and experience alter our perception. What enthralled us when we were kids might seem dull and manipulative to a more seasoned consumer. We might notice moments of dissonance -- wires and matte shots -- we were happy to overlook when we were naive enough to believe in fairy tales.

I saw the original Rocky in a theater almost 40 years ago and have largely refrained from catching it on cable or home video. I've seen parts of it here and there, but I've never screened it for a class or even thought much about it. It is in many ways an earnest and somewhat naive film, redeemed by a sweetness but leavened by a note of realism at the end. Surely by now it is no spoiler to report that underdog Philadelphia club fighter Rocky Balboa wins only a moral victory in the film.

All of the subsequent Rocky films follow the template established by the original; an ambivalent protagonist finally bears down and trains hard to prepare for a high-profile fight that inevitably turns out to be a bloody but ennobling ordeal. Someone is awarded victory, but it's suggested that the official verdict means less than the testing of a man's sinew and will. Rocky movies aren't about winning championships; they're about winning respect. The measure of a person isn't so much what sort of violence they can mete out as how much damage they can sustain and remain standing.

Creed is a Rocky movie, which means it is intrinsically hokey and not necessarily respectful of the time-space continuum. So let's not spend too much time wondering how Apollo Creed, who died in 1985 at the hands of Soviet super-villain Ivan Drago (in Rocky IV) could be the father of Michael B. Jordan, who was born in 1987. The movie explains it by having Apollo die before his illegitimate son Adonis (Jordan as an adult, Alex Henderson as a 12-year-old in a prologue set in 1998) was born.

Young Adonis may never have met his father, but there's something in the blood -- his proclivity for fighting has landed him in juvenile jail, from whence he's spirited by Apollo's widow (Phylicia Rashad) who takes him home to her palatial estate to nurture. But she's not quite able to civilize him -- as a young man Adonis moonlights as a club boxer down in Tijuana, finally quitting his apparently lucrative white-collar position to try to follow in his father's footsteps.

Only Adonis doesn't want to trade on his famous father's name, so he insists on fighting as "Adonis Johnson." But this reluctance to use his father's legacy extends only so far, so Adonis decamps to Philadelphia to try to convince his "Uncle" Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) to train him for bigger things. He finds Rocky in the restaurant named after his wife Adrian (who died shortly after the events of Rocky V) still wearing his iconic hat. Rocky is initially reluctant to work with the young fighter -- "I don't do that no more," he mutters -- but after Adonis makes a requisite show of heart, the familiar rhythms pulse through as yet another underdog fighter from Philadelphia is given a one-in-a-million shot at a title.

If you like Rocky movies, this is a good one, resonant with and respectful of the series' sometimes muddled mythology. It is exactly what you might expect, a sort-of remake of the very first film populated by mildly likable characters. Adonis is given a girlfriend, a musician facing eventual deafness (Tessa Thompson), and Rocky is given a challenging sub-plot to surmount.

Ryan Coogler, who directed Jordan in the remarkable Fruitvale Station, displays a sure hand as he colors within the lines established by the franchise. While the romance is unconvincing and Rocky's problems feel tacked on and melodramatic, not much time is wasted with them.

To call Creed the best Rocky movie since the original might seem faint praise to those who reflexively deride the sequels; it is in many ways a better-made movie than the somewhat rough-hewn Rocky. Coogler meets the formidable challenge of shooting over-the-top fight scenes that, in harmony with the series, seem to consist entirely of squarely landed haymakers. (And the contrast between Jordan's gym-sculpted physique and genuine cruiser-weight champ Tony Bellew's less spectacularly carved torso is instructive: optics don't win belts.)

But Rocky is an underdog story, with its narrative of an unknown actor-screenwriter-director fighting his own battle against Hollywood hegemony. The second film feels like a victory lap, but after that the franchise becomes increasingly reductive before rebounding slightly with the ridiculous but somehow poignant Rocky Balboa, which a lot of observers thought had to be the end of the series.

If, as expected, Creed proves to be a box-office success, it could serve as a reboot to the Rocky franchise and a fount of nostalgia for yet another generation. If so, we could do worse -- Adonis eventually embraces the name of the father he never knew and takes up his quest. And Stallone, finally freed from the absurdity of having to climb into the ring himself, delivers his best performance in years -- maybe ever.

MovieStyle on 11/27/2015