Tweet
Rocky, Reality, Fantasy, and One Thumb Sideways
By Eric Raskin (Dec 25, 2006)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
As you know if you’ve been reading my column regularly over the past year or so, I wasn’t too hot on the idea of a sixth Rocky movie. Frankly, as I wrote several times, I thought it was going to be awful, on account of a few factors: The movies in the series had for the most part been getting worse and worse, culminating with the embarrassing Rocky V; Sylvester Stallone was going to ask us to believe that a guy in his late-50s who had been told he’d suffered brain damage against Ivan Drago was going to be licensed to fight and okayed to take on the reigning heavyweight champion; and that heavyweight champion’s name was going to be Mason “The Line” Dixon, a name that crosses the line from colorfully silly, like the name Clubber Lang, to utterly ******.
I fully expected the movie to suck. But then the positive whispers started. Max Kellerman said he’d read the script and it was really good. (I didn’t realize at the time that Max had a decent-sized role in the movie.) The Ring’s Ivan Goldman caught an advance screening and gave it a positive review. The professional critics started chiming in, and on whatever they’re currently calling the former Siskel & Ebert show, the two reviewers who are neither Siskel nor Ebert both gave Rocky Balboa thumbs up. Quite a few other critics agreed.
So by the time I went to see the movie last week, I had no idea what to expect. Would it be horrible? Would it be spectacular?
I’ve seen the movie now. And I’m still not sure what the answer is. My thumb is stuck parallel to the ground.
It was neither horrible nor spectacular. It was a more satisfying ending to the series than Rocky V, and according to Stallone, that’s why he made it—because he felt his most beloved character, probably the most beloved character in the history of sports movies, deserved a better ending. But making a movie more satisfying than Rocky V is a little bit like beating Paula Jones on Celebrity Boxing; it doesn’t mean you’ve done anything special.
Ultimately, the problem with Rocky Balboa is that Stallone couldn’t decide whether he wanted it to be gritty and real, like the first movie and, to an extent, the second movie, or to be an entertaining piece of cinematic fantasy, like the third movie and, to an extent, the fourth movie. The first 45 minutes or so of Rocky Balboa were extremely well done, from a realism point of view. Stallone truly captured what the life of a retired former champ can be like—some jerks still want to pick a fight with you, most people just want to get their pictures taken with you or hear you tell them the stories of your greatest nights in the ring. The decision to have Adrian have died three years earlier of cancer was brilliant, partially because it spared us Talia Shire’s uncomfortably bad acting (see the argument-on-the-beach scene in Rocky III if you’ve forgotten just how bad she can be), but mostly because it established an effective emotional template. It helped put all of the characters in realistic places.
The first half of the movie was perhaps a bit slow, but it all rang true. My thumb was pointing ever so slightly upward.
And then Rocky suddenly, without enough justification for my tastes, told his son he wanted to fight again. He sees a computerized version of himself knock out Dixon on TV, and the next day he’s suddenly intent upon making a comeback. So he applies for a license, and in a scene that suggests Stallone is telling the audience to pretend Rocky V never happened, is granted a clean bill of health. (I realize that boxers do in fact get negative brain scans, then later get re-scanned and approved for a license, as was the case with Wayne McCullough and, under much sketchier circumstances, Joe Mesi. But if that’s the way they were going with Balboa, they should have explained that. The fact that they didn’t tells me that when Stallone does the eventual DVD gift pack re-release, Rocky V won’t be included in it.)
If I had the power of re-write, I would have had Dixon get pissed about the results of the computer fight and goad Rocky into fighting him BEFORE Rocky got the itch to come back. All the goading, and the dangling of cash, which Rocky could certainly use, might have been clichéd, but it also would have been more realistic than a guy who’s been retired for 20 years suddenly getting serious about a comeback purely through internal motivation.
From the middle of the movie on, it turned into fantasy. It was no longer slow or boring at all, but it was also almost impossible to suspend disbelief. The script went out of its way to TRY to make it realistic—Rocky’s training being catered to his age, the fight being billed as an exhibition—but it still felt ridiculous. We had to view Dixon as the worst heavyweight champion ever to believe that he wouldn’t dust the old man in a round or two, regardless of how much heart Balboa had. Remember William Joppy vs. Roberto Duran? Duran was “only” 47, and he got trounced in three rounds by a good-but-not-great titleholder. It was hard to believe that Balboa, a decade older than that, could be even a tiny bit competitive against the undefeated champ Dixon.
But this a movie, right? We’re not supposed to get caught up in that “realism” stuff, we’re supposed to just enjoy the ride, right? If you’re talking about a movie like Rocky IV, which is absurd but strangely fun to watch because of the absurdity, then yes, that’s true. But Rocky Balboa spends half a movie painting a realistic picture. Then it spends half a movie painting a ridiculous picture. I guess you wouldn’t really have an excuse for making a movie if Rocky didn’t come out of retirement, if he didn’t fight the champ, and if he didn’t at least prove to be competitive. Stallone had to go in that direction if he was going to bother making a sixth Rocky movie.
So he made a movie that was half one thing and half another thing, and both things worked on a certain level, but didn’t work on every level. It was a better ending to the story than Rocky V, and it was a better movie than I expected when I first heard it was being made. But was it actually a good movie? I can’t answer that question any better now that I’ve seen it than I could have a week ago.
Some other random Rocky ramblings:
• In Rocky Balboa, art imitated life by spinning off the Muhammad Ali-Rocky Marciano computer fight. And it got me thinking: Could life possibly imitate where this piece of “art” went with it? There’s only one former heavyweight champ who was as beloved as Balboa and who could possibly still fight a little bit: George Foreman. So, I’m not condoning this fight by any means, but I’m just throwing the idea out there: If, using Rocky Balboa as a springboard, a fight between Wladimir Klitschko and George Foreman was put together, could it capture the public’s interest? In the movie, Lou DiBella’s character talked about Dixon-Balboa as a million-PPV-buy fight; could Klitschko-Foreman do a million PPV buys?
• SPOILER ALERT! Do NOT read this paragraph if you don’t want to know anything about the ending of the movie…
*
*
*
*
*
In a film that went to such pains to try to make everything about the big fight feel like a real HBO broadcast, what was up with the scoring being totally unrealistic? First of all, as it was an exhibition fight, I wouldn’t even have thought there would be scoring. But if you’re going go ahead and have judges, in a 10-rounder in which there were four or five knockdowns scored (I lost count), how do you end up with all three judges scoring the fight 95-94? Would it have been so hard to make it like 94-92 instead, as long as you’re striving for realism on so many other fronts?
• With everything he’s been through in the last couple of years, you had to feel genuinely happy for Kellerman getting himself a role in this movie. He was living out a childhood fantasy, and you could tell he had fun with it.
• As my brother Fred pointed out, Rocky as restaurant owner is an idea that’s been around for almost 25 years—since the prophetic “Weird Al” Yankovic first conceived it in his song entitled “Theme From Rocky XIII,” which was set to the tune of “Eye Of The Tiger.” Feast on your eyes on the first verse and chorus, in case, unlike me, you don’t have most of Weird Al’s lyrics memorized:
Fat and weak, what a disgrace / Guess the champ got too lazy
Ain’t gonna fly now, he’s just takin’ up space / Sold his gloves, threw his eggs down the drain
But he’s no bum, he works down the street / He bought the neighborhood deli
Back on his feet, now he’s choppin’ up meat / Come inside, maybe you’ll hear him say
Try the rye or the Kaiser, they’re on special tonight / If you want, you can have an appetizer
You might like our salami and the liver’s all right /And they’d really go well with the rye … or the Kaiser
• Antonio Tarver’s acting wasn’t bad—in fact, all of the familiar boxing faces that popped up in the movie performed respectably—but his character was pretty poorly defined. On one level or another, all of Rocky’s past opponents were built up as villains and we were made to hate them. But Mason Dixon wasn’t much of a villain. He really wasn’t much of anything. He was just someone for Rocky to fight.
• I never thought I’d say this, but Stallone’s acting was actually pretty good. He had one really tricky, emotional scene, and I thought he pulled it off perfectly. Come to think of it, his acting was fairly strong in Copland too. Maybe Sly just needs a little extra flesh on his face in order to bring out his inner thespian.
By Eric Raskin (Dec 25, 2006)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
As you know if you’ve been reading my column regularly over the past year or so, I wasn’t too hot on the idea of a sixth Rocky movie. Frankly, as I wrote several times, I thought it was going to be awful, on account of a few factors: The movies in the series had for the most part been getting worse and worse, culminating with the embarrassing Rocky V; Sylvester Stallone was going to ask us to believe that a guy in his late-50s who had been told he’d suffered brain damage against Ivan Drago was going to be licensed to fight and okayed to take on the reigning heavyweight champion; and that heavyweight champion’s name was going to be Mason “The Line” Dixon, a name that crosses the line from colorfully silly, like the name Clubber Lang, to utterly ******.
I fully expected the movie to suck. But then the positive whispers started. Max Kellerman said he’d read the script and it was really good. (I didn’t realize at the time that Max had a decent-sized role in the movie.) The Ring’s Ivan Goldman caught an advance screening and gave it a positive review. The professional critics started chiming in, and on whatever they’re currently calling the former Siskel & Ebert show, the two reviewers who are neither Siskel nor Ebert both gave Rocky Balboa thumbs up. Quite a few other critics agreed.
So by the time I went to see the movie last week, I had no idea what to expect. Would it be horrible? Would it be spectacular?
I’ve seen the movie now. And I’m still not sure what the answer is. My thumb is stuck parallel to the ground.
It was neither horrible nor spectacular. It was a more satisfying ending to the series than Rocky V, and according to Stallone, that’s why he made it—because he felt his most beloved character, probably the most beloved character in the history of sports movies, deserved a better ending. But making a movie more satisfying than Rocky V is a little bit like beating Paula Jones on Celebrity Boxing; it doesn’t mean you’ve done anything special.
Ultimately, the problem with Rocky Balboa is that Stallone couldn’t decide whether he wanted it to be gritty and real, like the first movie and, to an extent, the second movie, or to be an entertaining piece of cinematic fantasy, like the third movie and, to an extent, the fourth movie. The first 45 minutes or so of Rocky Balboa were extremely well done, from a realism point of view. Stallone truly captured what the life of a retired former champ can be like—some jerks still want to pick a fight with you, most people just want to get their pictures taken with you or hear you tell them the stories of your greatest nights in the ring. The decision to have Adrian have died three years earlier of cancer was brilliant, partially because it spared us Talia Shire’s uncomfortably bad acting (see the argument-on-the-beach scene in Rocky III if you’ve forgotten just how bad she can be), but mostly because it established an effective emotional template. It helped put all of the characters in realistic places.
The first half of the movie was perhaps a bit slow, but it all rang true. My thumb was pointing ever so slightly upward.
And then Rocky suddenly, without enough justification for my tastes, told his son he wanted to fight again. He sees a computerized version of himself knock out Dixon on TV, and the next day he’s suddenly intent upon making a comeback. So he applies for a license, and in a scene that suggests Stallone is telling the audience to pretend Rocky V never happened, is granted a clean bill of health. (I realize that boxers do in fact get negative brain scans, then later get re-scanned and approved for a license, as was the case with Wayne McCullough and, under much sketchier circumstances, Joe Mesi. But if that’s the way they were going with Balboa, they should have explained that. The fact that they didn’t tells me that when Stallone does the eventual DVD gift pack re-release, Rocky V won’t be included in it.)
If I had the power of re-write, I would have had Dixon get pissed about the results of the computer fight and goad Rocky into fighting him BEFORE Rocky got the itch to come back. All the goading, and the dangling of cash, which Rocky could certainly use, might have been clichéd, but it also would have been more realistic than a guy who’s been retired for 20 years suddenly getting serious about a comeback purely through internal motivation.
From the middle of the movie on, it turned into fantasy. It was no longer slow or boring at all, but it was also almost impossible to suspend disbelief. The script went out of its way to TRY to make it realistic—Rocky’s training being catered to his age, the fight being billed as an exhibition—but it still felt ridiculous. We had to view Dixon as the worst heavyweight champion ever to believe that he wouldn’t dust the old man in a round or two, regardless of how much heart Balboa had. Remember William Joppy vs. Roberto Duran? Duran was “only” 47, and he got trounced in three rounds by a good-but-not-great titleholder. It was hard to believe that Balboa, a decade older than that, could be even a tiny bit competitive against the undefeated champ Dixon.
But this a movie, right? We’re not supposed to get caught up in that “realism” stuff, we’re supposed to just enjoy the ride, right? If you’re talking about a movie like Rocky IV, which is absurd but strangely fun to watch because of the absurdity, then yes, that’s true. But Rocky Balboa spends half a movie painting a realistic picture. Then it spends half a movie painting a ridiculous picture. I guess you wouldn’t really have an excuse for making a movie if Rocky didn’t come out of retirement, if he didn’t fight the champ, and if he didn’t at least prove to be competitive. Stallone had to go in that direction if he was going to bother making a sixth Rocky movie.
So he made a movie that was half one thing and half another thing, and both things worked on a certain level, but didn’t work on every level. It was a better ending to the story than Rocky V, and it was a better movie than I expected when I first heard it was being made. But was it actually a good movie? I can’t answer that question any better now that I’ve seen it than I could have a week ago.
Some other random Rocky ramblings:
• In Rocky Balboa, art imitated life by spinning off the Muhammad Ali-Rocky Marciano computer fight. And it got me thinking: Could life possibly imitate where this piece of “art” went with it? There’s only one former heavyweight champ who was as beloved as Balboa and who could possibly still fight a little bit: George Foreman. So, I’m not condoning this fight by any means, but I’m just throwing the idea out there: If, using Rocky Balboa as a springboard, a fight between Wladimir Klitschko and George Foreman was put together, could it capture the public’s interest? In the movie, Lou DiBella’s character talked about Dixon-Balboa as a million-PPV-buy fight; could Klitschko-Foreman do a million PPV buys?
• SPOILER ALERT! Do NOT read this paragraph if you don’t want to know anything about the ending of the movie…
*
*
*
*
*
In a film that went to such pains to try to make everything about the big fight feel like a real HBO broadcast, what was up with the scoring being totally unrealistic? First of all, as it was an exhibition fight, I wouldn’t even have thought there would be scoring. But if you’re going go ahead and have judges, in a 10-rounder in which there were four or five knockdowns scored (I lost count), how do you end up with all three judges scoring the fight 95-94? Would it have been so hard to make it like 94-92 instead, as long as you’re striving for realism on so many other fronts?
• With everything he’s been through in the last couple of years, you had to feel genuinely happy for Kellerman getting himself a role in this movie. He was living out a childhood fantasy, and you could tell he had fun with it.
• As my brother Fred pointed out, Rocky as restaurant owner is an idea that’s been around for almost 25 years—since the prophetic “Weird Al” Yankovic first conceived it in his song entitled “Theme From Rocky XIII,” which was set to the tune of “Eye Of The Tiger.” Feast on your eyes on the first verse and chorus, in case, unlike me, you don’t have most of Weird Al’s lyrics memorized:
Fat and weak, what a disgrace / Guess the champ got too lazy
Ain’t gonna fly now, he’s just takin’ up space / Sold his gloves, threw his eggs down the drain
But he’s no bum, he works down the street / He bought the neighborhood deli
Back on his feet, now he’s choppin’ up meat / Come inside, maybe you’ll hear him say
Try the rye or the Kaiser, they’re on special tonight / If you want, you can have an appetizer
You might like our salami and the liver’s all right /And they’d really go well with the rye … or the Kaiser
• Antonio Tarver’s acting wasn’t bad—in fact, all of the familiar boxing faces that popped up in the movie performed respectably—but his character was pretty poorly defined. On one level or another, all of Rocky’s past opponents were built up as villains and we were made to hate them. But Mason Dixon wasn’t much of a villain. He really wasn’t much of anything. He was just someone for Rocky to fight.
• I never thought I’d say this, but Stallone’s acting was actually pretty good. He had one really tricky, emotional scene, and I thought he pulled it off perfectly. Come to think of it, his acting was fairly strong in Copland too. Maybe Sly just needs a little extra flesh on his face in order to bring out his inner thespian.
Comment