Stallone’s sixth outing as Rocky is smaller, sadder and better than anyone had a right to expect. The first hour, a widower telling old stories in a half-empty restaurant, is the best in the series since 1976. The fight is the part we could have done without.
Sixteen years after Rocky V (1990), Sylvester Stallone writes, directs and stars in a sixth film about the Philadelphia fighter, and the surprise is how little of it is about fighting. For most of its 102 minutes Rocky Balboa is a film about a widower who has run out of people to tell his stories to. It is small, slow and sad, and it is better than it has any right to be. The boxing arrives late, as if out of obligation, and it is the weakest thing in the film.
The opening is a man taking a folding chair out of a tree. Rocky keeps it there so he can sit by Adrian’s grave, and on the anniversary of her death he drags Paulie (Burt Young) round the old neighbourhood: the pet shop where she worked, the rink where he took her skating, now a fenced lot. Clark Mathis shoots the city in winter greys and streetlamp orange, mostly handheld, and Franco-Giacomo Carbone hangs Rocky’s restaurant with framed fight photographs so the past is on every wall while he talks to diners about it. Spider Rico (Pedro Lovell), who fought him in the first film, eats there for nothing. We did not expect to be moved by any of this, and we were, chiefly because Stallone plays Rocky as a man who knows the stories bore people and tells them anyway.
Young’s Paulie is the best he has been in the series, sour, ashamed and grieving in a way he will not name, and the film lets him be unkind about Adrian and then sorry. Geraldine Hughes plays Marie, the girl Rocky walked home in the first film, without a scrap of romance, which is the right call. Milo Ventimiglia, as the son who would rather not be Rocky’s son at the office, gets the speech the film is built around, about how life hits harder than any opponent and the trick is to keep moving. We knew Stallone had written it for himself, we could hear the seams, and it got us anyway. We were slightly embarrassed about that on the way home.
Then the plot has to happen. Mason ‘The Line’ Dixon (Antonio Tarver) is an undefeated champion nobody likes, a computer simulation says a young Rocky would have beaten him, and his promoter, Lou DiBella playing himself, smells an exhibition. Tarver is a real boxer rather than an actor, and the film gives him a trainer (Henry G. Sanders), one scene about not being loved and not much else; he is a target, not a character. Rocky asks the state commission for a licence, is refused, and delivers a speech about the right to some pain that is overwritten and that Stallone plays with such conviction we let it go. The training montage follows, with the steps and the sides of beef, and Bill Conti brings back the fanfare he has been sitting on for an hour. It did what it has always done to us.
The fight is shot to look like televised boxing, with the video sheen, the ringside commentators and the on-screen graphics. It is a bold idea and it does not work. Sean Albertson cuts the first hour with real patience, letting scenes sit until they are uncomfortable, and then cuts the fight into commentary-box angles so quickly we lose the shape of the ring. The first film’s fight was ugly and you always knew where both men were. Here we mostly know who has just been hit. Mike Tyson turns up at ringside as himself, which reminds us what a working heavyweight looks like and does the film no favours.
Against the series this sits second, and a long way behind first. The 1976 film was a small picture about a lonely man given one chance, and every sequel after it swapped the loneliness for a rival and a montage. Stallone has gone back to the loneliness and found he still knows how to write it. What he cannot do is stop: every character gets a speech about the past, the simulation is a silly hinge for a whole third act, and the film explains its feelings after the faces have already done it.
See it for the folding chair, for Young, and for a restaurant where the owner tells the same story every night and means it. It runs 102 minutes and carries a 12A. The best of it is over before anyone puts on gloves.
