>>REVIEW
ROCKY BALBOA
STARRING: Sylvester Stallone
DIRECTED BY: Sylvester Stallone
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Sylvester Stallone is still alive and has made another Rocky movie. It’s called Rocky Balboa and is supposed to be a return to the roots of the series, to a grittier old-school Rocky. He’s in Philly, living in a small, modest house, alone. Adrian has passed on, but has been immortalized in a restaurant named for her that "The Champ" owns and operates. He makes the rounds telling the same ’ol glory days stories to the patrons, and spouting that annoying "How you doin?" line every two minutes,
"How you doin?"
"How you doin?"
"How you doin?"
Better than you, Rock, from the looks of things. I mean, he’s fit and all, but Stallone has had so much surgery that he now strongly resembles Tammy Faye Baker. Really. Check out the eyebrows. I have suspicions that every time he gets hit in this film, its not sweat flying off his face, but Botox, and that the cut-man in his corner isn’t some legend of boxing, "Quick Hands Lou" or something, but a renowned Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, there to give Stallone some tweaking should he get his nose punched clean off or have some stitches blow out.
"Cut me! Ya gotta cut me! Pull back my face! Lift up my forehead! Cut me! Make me gorgeous!"
In some scenes he looks almost exactly like that puppet character of himself from the Brisk commercial a few years back, like rubber, and I was wondering, as I sat there peppered with jabs of schmaltz, if that made his face more durable or more fragile.
Apparently more durable. In this installment, Rocky comes out of retirement to fight in a glorified sparring match with the reigning undefeated heavyweight champ of the world, Mason "The Line" Dixon, played by real-world former light heavyweight champ Antonio Tarver. Rock doesn’t exactly get his ass kicked like you’d think he would, at 20 years the guy’s senior. Maybe they stitched some steel in there.
Mason is characterized as shallow and vain, he’s not a people’s champ like Rocky was. He’s so good, so fast, that he’s never had to dig down to the pit of his gut to pull out the win on will alone, like Balboa is famous for. He’s got no heart and the fans know it. What he needs is something like a boxing match with a tough ex-champ to instill in him some of that Rocky spirit. This is perfect cause Rocky’s got some things he needs to let out and rather than talk to someone he wants to get in the ring and punch another dude in the face. Fair enough. The two fighters’ paths are set to intersect when a sports show does a "Then vs. Now" segment that offers Balboa as the computer-tabulated winner of a fictional match between him in his prime and the current champ.
Rocky has a somewhat strained relationship with his son, Rob, who seems tired of living in the shadow of his famous Dad, and we get some emotive music and dialogue between Balboa and Pauly, the only other original character still around. The film plods along setting us up for the point of the whole thing – the obligatory montage series of training scenes and the fight itself. Ho-hum. Yawn. Check watch.
There’s some black and white scenes touched up with flares of color, that for some reason made me really want some Gatorade. Stallone also includes some cuts to the first Rocky as flashbacks, an attempt to carry the current film on the back of the original. It doesn’t work. For some reason, he also decides to cheapen the famous scene of Balboa running the stairs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but this time with a dog in his arms. That doesn’t work either. Stallone incorporates Philly slang, accents, old neighborhoods and peoples all to try to capture the grit and heart of the original, but in the end we don’t really care very much and Rocky Balboa falls flat on the canvas like Apollo Creed. Stay down, Champ, stay down. |
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