Creed: good doses of nostalgia

A scene from the movie.

Apollo Creed is Rocky Balboa’s(Sylvester Stallone) most iconic rival, his fiercest competitor as seen in the first four Rocky movies. He was also one of his best friends, almost a brother. He died fighting an opponent, in Rocky’s arms, who had stepped in as his manager in that particular contest. You would expect Creed’s son, Adonis Johnson(Michael B Jordon), to grow up hating Rocky, for not being able to stop his father bleeding to death inside the ring. But as it turns out, Adonis grows up hating his father, to the extent of even refusing to acknowledge him. He idolises Rocky, who he manages to convince out of his self imposed exile from boxing into coaching him. Johnson is an orphan and Creed’s bastard son.

Just like the unexpected touch in a seemingly generic sports movie, Creed avoids the pitfalls of the genre with new flourishes. It’s a formulaic but an effectively entertaining film with good doses of nostalgia for fans of the series.

While Adonis fills the void that was created from Rocky’s troubled relationship with his son, he finds in him a father figure. This exchange of son-father relationships gives the fans a chance to relive the Rocky in his prime through Adonis– there are delectable throwbacks such as the early portions of Adonis’ training sessions under his guru.

Genre: Sports drama
Cast:Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson
Director: Ryan Coogler
Story: A 70 year old Rocky Balboa returns to boxing, as he takes up the challenge of training Adonis, son of his late friend and former rival

The film works not so much because it is great cinema but the fact that it fulfils the expectations one has from it, even for those who haven’t watched even one Rocky movie. I haven’t. But I have friends who have been life-long fans. For most, I gathered, it’s an inseparable part of having grown up on movies. The success of the film is also that it communicates the nostalgia even to those who are outsiders to the Rocky fandom.

Yet Creed sags time to time because of its lightweight script. It’s a good natured, cheery film but the tone becomes too sentimental in parts. The linear narrative is crippled with predictable plot-points, especially a development in Rocky’s life towards the end. But thankfully, the scenes themselves are executed convincingly. The film doesn’t delve into the complexities of the characters, its plays by the rules of simpler, more innocent world of sports dramas.

Some of the film’s most entertaining scenes are the training sessions and boxing matches. At one point, the entry of two boxing stars in a match becomes like a slo-mo pop music video, the arena throbbing with the beats of Hip-hop soundtrack. The action is visceral. The director extracts maximum tension and adrenaline in the climactic fight that the audience responded to with hoots and whistles. With Stallone shouting match-changing instructions from the sidelines, its hard to not get invested in the contests. Jordan is beautifully sculpted and the director uses his physicality to the hilt injecting a sense of urgency. Although some of the weakest portions of the film involves Jordan. Perhaps the character falls short of the kind of personality Rocky possesses. Amid all the male-bonding, the lovely Tessa Thompson, who plays Johnson’s musician girlfriend from the apartment below, makes her presence felt with an assured performance.

But Rocky is Stallone and Stallone is Rocky. The character is so deeply linked to his personality that even in a film where he hardly takes part in any action, he makes every scene work. As a retired heavyweight champ who is also a broken soul, mourning the untimely loss of his wife, Stallion gives the character a deeply felt dignity and quietness. And in last scene, in the iconic stone steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, pays himself a deserving tribute.