ADRIIIIAAAAAAAAN! Finally - my Rocky Balboa review!

So while I have a little time, I thought I'd finally post my long-awaited ROCKY review:

ROCKY BALBOA Review:

I don't think I need to go into too much detail on this one, suffice to say that after a very lackluster Rocky V, Sylvester Stallone did the seemingly impossible with this sixth installment and made arguably the best Rocky movie since the original. Rocky Balboa is just a great, great movie. Not great in the sense of being an artistic or technical masterpiece, but legitimately great in that it's a simple, straightforard movie that can be watched over and over again. This one does everything a Rocky movie is supposed to - it inspires you, it gives you goosebumps, it gets you invested in the characters - Rocky especially, and it will have you fighting the urge to stand up and cheer as you watch. I saw many movies this past year with better scripts, saw many films with better acting, but few, if any, that left me feeling like I did after watching Rocky Balboa - happy, excited, pumped-up, and yes, even a little inspired.

Basically, Rocky Balboa is so good because it does away with much of the cartoonish action-movie fluff that has defined the franchise since Rocky III. Instead, Stallone creates a movie that acts as a true parallel and bookend to the original Rocky movie. As in the first movie, Rocky goes back to being a true underdog, and the movie isn't so much about the glitz and glamour of the big fight, but about what that fight represents, about how it is one last shot for a man to prove a point to the world. Sure, this is still a boxing movie, but like the original, this is at its heart a character drama.

And man, I give insane amounts of credit to Stallone. I'll be honest, up until recently, I never thought all that much of him as an actor or as a creative force in Hollywood. But as I read his series of fan Q & A's on Aint It Cool News, in the weeks leading up to this movie's release, I was just totally blown away by Stallone's character and his willingness to be humble about his career and honest and appreciative to his fans. After seeing the movie, I was even more impressed with the man, because screw the haters, Stallone knocks this one out of the park, delivering, I'd say, his best acting performance to date. As always, Sly easily slips into the Rocky character, and it's fun as ever to be reunited with an old friend with regards to Rocky - certainly one of the great film heroes of our time. But contrast his performance here to that of Rocky V, which also cast Rocky as an aging, past-his-prime guy trying to transition into a new phase of his life. While that movie had everything feeling forced and rarely ringing true, Rocky Balboa just feels right from the get-go. This is, finally, the real Rocky that we know and love, and Stallone mixes humor and a surprising amount of dramatic gravitas into his performance here. Maybe you just have to be a sucker for this stuff like I am, but when Rocky emotionally lectures his son about not letting others tell you what you can and can't do, me and my brother just looked at each other in the theater, both of us thinking: "daaaaaaaaaaaamn!"

Part of the reason this movie resonates so much, I think, is that to me it perfectly takes on one of the most appealing themes in drama - the old fighter getting one last shot to reclaim his former glory. For some reason, in this day and age we're living in, it's an especially powerful idea. Most action films today are dominated by nearly androgynous, metrosexual boys playing men. Rather than Stallone, Arnold, and Ford we have Orlando Bloom, DiCaprio, and Ledger. Nothing against those guys, but it makes you wonder - where have the real-deal action heroes gone? Well, here he is, baby. The real-deal, the Italian Stallion, Rocky F'n Balboa - back for one mo' round to show the young punks how it's done. He's old, he's flabby, he's past his prime, but dammit all, don't count him out yet. Sure, in real life such a comeback might be fantasy - but this is the movies, and Stallone does a hell of a job of convincing us that Rocky, as we suspect, has no chance in hell of winning his last fight. But then the magic happens, and Rocky digs down deep, and unless you are the world's biggest cynic you'll be on your feet believing that on any given day one man can beat another and by God this might just be Rocky's day.

But again, this movie isn't even so much about the fight as it is the idea - the idea that a man can have a second act in life, but only once he's excorcised the demons of his first. As we see Rocky roaming his old Philadelphia haunts, trying to make human connection like an old ghost, we see the loneliness and disconnectedness of a once great man, and we wonder how the Champ could have fallen so far (simple - the end of his boxing career and the death of his beloved Adrian).

Sure, this is a movie that can be picked apart, overanalyzed, and looked at through a cynical, critical eye. There's some spotty acting here and there (our old friend Milo V of Heroes fame, in particular, is a little adrift as Rocky's put-upon young adult son). There's some odd pacing at times as well, and Rocky's opponent, while servicable as a foil for our hero, is never all that interesting of a character. But what counts here is that Rocky Balboa perfectly revives the scrappy, underdog spirit of the original. Plain and simple, it works, and I found myself loving this movie for its pure sense of hope and spirit. Stallone has said this is it for Rocky, and I'm glad he got a chance to make such a classy finale for a franchise that deserved to go out with a bang.

My Grade: A -

Alright -- time to go, but I'll be back soon because there's a new season of TWENTY BY-GOD FOUR coming soon that needs some hype on the blog.