--- title: "Rocky IV" year: 1985 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/rocky-iv" fi1m_score: 52 critics_score: 44 critics_reviews: 10 published: "2026-09-19T15:46:42.526616+00:00" updated: "2026-09-19T15:46:42.699039+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Rocky IV (1985) Directed by Sylvester Stallone · 1h 31m · MPA PG · Drama, Action **Fi1m score: 52** · Critics 44 from 10 reviews *In a sentence:* A ninety-minute film, of which a good third is montage and one stretch is a montage of the film so far > Stallone strips the Rocky story to a poster and a soundtrack: one Soviet giant, one American in the snow, and Vince DiCola’s synthesiser doing the talking. The training footage still gets the pulse up; everything around it has been cut away. ## Synopsis Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) is heavyweight champion of the world, rich, settled in a large house in Philadelphia with Adrian (Talia Shire), and short of anything to do. His brother-in-law Paulie (Burt Young) is given a talking robot for his birthday and takes to it. Then Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), a Soviet amateur the size of a doorway, arrives in America with his wife Ludmilla (Brigitte Nielsen) and a handler, Nicoli Koloff (Michael Pataki), and announces at a press conference that he will fight professionals. Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), retired and restless, decides the proper answer is an exhibition bout in Las Vegas, with Rocky and Duke (Tony Burton) in his corner. Adrian thinks it a bad idea. Apollo comes out to dancing girls and a stage full of stars and stripes, and the bell goes. ## Review Sylvester Stallone writes, directs and stars in the fourth Rocky film, which runs 91 minutes and opens with the last few minutes of the third. Rocky Balboa is champion, comfortable and a little lost, and the film has no interest in any of that. It wants a villain, and it gets one: Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), a Soviet amateur who arrives in America with his wife Ludmilla (Brigitte Nielsen) and a handler, Nicoli Koloff (Michael Pataki), and is presented at a press conference as something built in a laboratory. Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) takes it personally and arranges an exhibition in Las Vegas. What happens in that ring we will not describe; the rest of the film is Rocky’s answer to it. The plot is an outline and Stallone knows it. His script has perhaps four scenes in which two people sit and talk, and in each of them one person says what they feel while the other nods. Talia Shire’s Adrian gets one real objection and then a change of heart. Burt Young’s Paulie is given a talking robot for his birthday, and the film treats this as normal. Weathers is the one actor allowed some life: his Apollo is a man who cannot bear to have stopped, and the scenes in which he talks Rocky into letting him fight are the only ones with two ideas in them. Lundgren is used as a wall. He is enormous and blond, shot from below by Bill Butler so that he fills the frame and the ceiling lights sit behind his head like a halo, and he is given almost nothing to say. He says it slowly. Nielsen does the talking for him, and she is cold and amused and better than her lines. Bill Kenney’s production design gives the Soviets a training hall of steel, monitors and men in white coats, with Drago wired up like a car on a test bench, and Tom Bronson dresses them in grey and red so that nobody could mistake them for the home side. Then the montages, which are what people remember and what the film really is. John W. Wheeler and Don Zimmerman cut Rocky in the snow against Drago in the machine: a log across a shoulder, a bar on a rack; a sledge dragged uphill, a treadmill; a beard coming in, a needle going in. Vince DiCola scores it with a synthesiser that is one part march and one part heartbeat, and the cuts land on the downbeat every time. We felt our pulse go up, and we were slightly embarrassed about it, because we knew exactly what was being done to us and it made no difference. The editors earn that. The writing does not, since the montage is doing the work of the second act and there is no second act underneath it. There is also, at about the hour mark, a montage of the film so far, with Rocky driving at night and remembering scenes we watched forty minutes earlier. In a film this short that is a confession. We were bored by it, then irritated, because the picture had run out of things to show and had decided to show them again. The fight is staged as Stallone stages all of them: close, sweating, in slow motion, with a great deal of fluid leaving faces. Butler lights the arena hard and white over a grey crowd, and Stu Nahan’s commentary explains everything we can already see. We will not say how it goes, though the tagline has a fair idea. The politics come down to a speech and a crowd, and the crowd is not believable for a second. Against the series’ own standards this is the thinnest of the four. The first [*Rocky*](https://film.one/film/rocky), in 1976, was a small film about a man who wanted to last fifteen rounds. This one is about a country, and a country turns out to be a duller character than a man. What the film says, when it says anything, is that a good heart beats a good laboratory. See it with a room full of people who know the songs and it will be a decent hour and a half. On a sofa with one other person it is 91 minutes of a man being shouted at by a synthesiser, plus a robot. *Fi1m score 52, published 19 September 2026.* ## What the critics say Most critics do not think much of Rocky IV, and they agree on why. The reviews call it a Cold War fairy tale in which Rocky fights the Soviet Union rather than a man, with the supporting characters shrunk to shadows and the dialogue witless. What praise there is goes to the fights themselves: even the sharper notices concede that it is hard not to root for the underdog against the bully, and Dolph Lundgren’s Drago is singled out as a vivid new villain. The reservations cluster on the montages, which several critics say replace the human feeling of the earlier films with something closer to a pop video, and on the jingoism. The spread is wide. The one clearly positive review, from The Times, is for Stallone’s 2021 director’s cut, which /Film also finds an improvement; The Guardian, reviewing the same cut, calls it pointless. The original theatrical release has almost no defenders. ### Reviews we read (10) - **The Times**, Kevin Maher (★★★★☆): This 35th-anniversary re-release of the political Rocky instalment is ridiculously entertaining and impeccably well constructed, even if preposterous. The critic highlights the extra footage from the Apollo Creed funeral and additional fight scenes in the cleaned-up director’s cut. [Read](https://www.thetimes.com/culture/film/article/rocky-iv-rocky-vs-drago-review-ridiculously-entertaining-and-preposterous-q2mjxx8sl) - **Variety** (60/100, inferred): Stallone sloughs it off shamelessly in Rocky IV but it remains impossible not to root for the underdog to whup the bully one more time. Beyond its visceral appeal the film is truly the worst of the lot with a contrived opponent in Dolph Lundgren, though the fight scenes still pull in fans despite being predictable and preposterous. [Read](https://variety.com/1984/film/reviews/rocky-iv-1200426477/) - **The New York Times**, Janet Maslin (50/100, inferred): Rocky IV turns the boxer into an international diplomat battling a Soviet villain in a contest framed as us against them, but the two fights share the same carnival sameness that has become the series' most debilitating feature. The visual style emphasizes slow-motion bodily fluids while Drago stands out as a vivid new villain. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/27/movies/screen-rocky-iv-vs-the-ussr.html) - **Time Out**, CPea (40/100, inferred): The film is reduced to its barest three-act structure of revenge against a Russian opponent, with other characters diminished to shadows and dialogue that is witless. It delivers raw emotion as battleground cinema despite the political messaging and focus on Rocky. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/rocky-iv) - **RogerEbert.com**, Roger Ebert (30/100, inferred): The Rocky series has lost its legs with this predictable last gasp that drains out human emotions in favor of technology and MTV-style montages. The fight scenes and contrived plot points like a chanting Russian crowd feel unbelievable and formulaic. [Read](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/rocky-iv-1985) - **The Guardian**, Peter Bradshaw (30/100, inferred): Stallone’s re-edit of his Cold War sequel is a ridiculous and largely pointless undertaking that fails to salvage the film. The critic singles out the persistent goofy Reagan-era fantasy and political saber-rattling, along with the unsettling death of Apollo Creed, as elements that render the redemption arc hollow. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/nov/11/rocky-iv-rocky-vs-drago-review-silly-directors-cut-is-a-losing-battle) - **Empire**, Ian Nathan (20/100, inferred): The critic finds the film ridiculous jingoistic nonsense that threw credibility out the window by turning the story into a Cold War parable. He singles out the excessive focus on bulging physiques in the training sequences and fight for complaint. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/rocky-iv-review/) - **Los Angeles Times**, Sheila Benson (20/100, inferred): Stallone's isolation as a filmmaker who tasted early success leads to the elephantine vacuousness of Rocky IV, which pits Rocky against the Soviet Union in sweaty supercolossal close-ups. The film portrays Soviets as simplistic animals and technology as no match for a pure heart, resulting in grim and witless storytelling. [Read](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-11-27-ca-4688-story.html) - **/Film**, Chris Evangelista (6.5/10): Stallone's director's cut removes the robot and restores character moments, making the film more earnest and honest while humanizing Drago and better explaining Apollo's decision to fight. It remains imperfect due to its montages but is a clear improvement over the original theatrical version. [Read](https://www.slashfilm.com/659352/rocky-iv-directors-cut-review-say-bye-to-paulies-robot-say-hello-to-a-mostly-better-movie/) - **HeyUGuys**, Cai Ross (45/100, inferred): The film is a reductive Cold War fairy tale and one-dimensional kids' movie that pads its short runtime with montages and a talking robot, marking a sharp departure from the earlier entries in the series. The critic recalls its energetic appeal and crowd-pleasing excitement as a child in 1985 but notes how dated and simplistic it now seems. [Read](https://www.heyuguys.com/rocky-iv-retrospective/) ## Details - **Director:** Sylvester Stallone - **Director:** Sylvester Stallone - **Writer:** Sylvester Stallone - **Cinematography:** Bill Butler - **Editor:** John W. Wheeler, Don Zimmerman - **Music:** Vince DiCola - **Production design:** Bill Kenney - **Costume design:** Tom Bronson - **Producer:** Robert Chartoff, Irwin Winkler - **Cast:** Sylvester Stallone as Robert "Rocky" Balboa; Dolph Lundgren as Ivan Drago; Carl Weathers as Apollo Creed; Talia Shire as Adrianna "Adrian" Balboa; Burt Young as Paulie Pennino; Brigitte Nielsen as Ludmilla Vobet Drago; Tony Burton as Tony "Duke" Evers; Michael Pataki as Nicoli Koloff - **Runtime:** 1h 31m - **Certificate (MPA):** PG - **Release (the US):** 21 November 1985 - **Genres:** Drama, Action - **Budget:** $31 million - **Box office:** $300 million - **Trailer:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qjV0bB2V0Q ## Where to watch in the US - AMC+: streaming - Pluto TV: free - Apple TV: add-on, hd - Amazon Prime Video: add-on - The Roku Channel: add-on, hd - Amazon Prime Video: rent $3.99, uhd - Apple TV: rent $3.99, hd - Amazon Prime Video: buy $6.99, uhd - Apple TV: buy $14.99, hd *Checked 2026-09-19.* Also available in: AE, AR, AT, AU, BE, BG, BR, CA, CH, CL, CO, CZ, DE, DK, EE, ES, FI, FR, GB, GR, HK, HU, ID, IE, IL, IN, IT, JP, LT, MX, MY, NL, NO, NZ, PA, PH, PL, PT, RO, SE, SG, TH, TR, UA, US, VN, ZA. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## If you liked this - *Rocky* (1976), Fi1m 85: The small, sweaty original, about a man who only wants to last fifteen rounds. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/rocky.md) - *The Set-Up* (1949): Robert Wise’s 72-minute boxing noir, one bout in near real time, no montage required. - *Fat City* (1972): John Huston’s fighters in Stockton, California, losing slowly; the honest version of this story. - *Girlfight* (2000): Michelle Rodriguez trains in a Brooklyn gym; the boxing picture with a person in it. - *Top Gun* (1986), Fi1m 71: The other great Reagan-era poster film: same flags, same synthesisers, jets instead of gloves. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/top-gun.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/rocky-iv