How can you have never seen Rocky? is a legit question. It came out when I was four, so seeing it in theaters was a no-go. By the time I was going to the movies and renting videos, Stallone had made Rocky II, III, IV, and V, and the franchise had become jingoistic, tacky, and just not as good as the Oscar-nominated original. "Rocky fighting a Soviet super-solider" is where I learned about Rocky. "Apollo getting punched to death" is where I began. In the 80s and 90s, I was way more interested in Schwarzenegger in action movies than in boxing. Besides the reputation of the franchise, the personality of Sly Stallone in the late 1980s had evolved into a monosyllabic brute from the Rambo movies...which I also haven't seen. So why would I want to see an old dusty movie from the 70s with that dumb brute in it? Maybe I liked Arnold better than Sly because I like sci-fi. Sly didn't make any sci-fi movies until Demolition Man and Judge Dredd in the 90s. Number three: I have no interest in boxing or boxing movies. Raging Bull is amazing, but I have not seen any boxing movies beyond that.
My teenage son was going to Philadelphia for a class trip this month, and my wife and I felt it was irresponsible to send him without having seen Rocky first. They'd certainly be ascending those steps from that running montage, so I wanted my son to know why everyone was punching their fists in the air and jumping up and down.
Rocky completely surprised me. It's not a boxing movie. There's a brief boxing scene at the beginning, and the match with Apollo Creed at the end isn't even that long. The vast majority of this movie is a very 1970s character study of Rocky Balboa, the gentle, bighearted lug who has a chance to make it out of his dead-end life...if he believes in himself enough to take it; his romance with the shy, bookish Adrian (Talia Shire); and her striving yet hopeless, and mentally ill brother Paulie.
As I understand it, Rocky's struggles with self-confidence are a metaphor for America's mid-70s post-Vietnam malaise, so I guess it makes sense for the Reagan-era sequels to parallel the mood of the American people.
Stallone and Shire are terrific, and I had no idea Stallone played such a thoughtful (if simple) guy. Paulie seems so doomed to failure, I wish they'd had the guts to have him die or go to jail. I watched the trailers for all the sequels, and I couldn't believe Paulie was still around in Rocky IV! He didn't drink himself to death yet?
Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) is an obvious parody of Muhammad Ali, I knew that going in, but how they make fun of Ali was unexpected: Ali is not mocked in racist terms, his skill as a boxer is not questioned. He's mocked for cynically using his fame to make as much money as possible, as the champ who has forgotten to take the sport seriously, a clown who dresses up as Uncle Sam for the Bicentennial bout.
Stallone brilliantly wrote Rocky as a vehicle for himself, and he's fortunate the director John G. Avildsen made such a thoughtful, tender movie out of it. The movie looks like it was shot on location in Philadelphia, and I wish more movies would shoot on locations. The streets of Philly add so much value to the film. My Stub Hubby grade: A