"Do not let those numbers drive you crazy," fiftysomething ex-boxer Rocky Balboa tells his yuppie accountant son in the film that bears both their names. "Use an eraser. Get rid of 'em all.
" I never thought I'd use the phrase "metatexual comment" in a review of a movie, but a thing is what it is. The line occurs in a sweetly awkward scene between a broken-down, working class dad (Sylvester Stallone) and his slick white-collar son (Milo Ventimiglia) in the lobby of a glass-and-steel office building. But while it's presented as a tossed-off bit of character development, it plays like an unsubtle plea to the viewer: "Forget the other four sequels and give yourself over to this one, because it's not another unnecessary, money-grubbing, button-pushing, factory-tooled product.
It's a back-to-basics melodrama about a shambling old boxer re-entering the ring for a no-stakes bout with a young, powerful champ, not because he thinks he can beat the kid, but to prove he's still got heart. Honest to god, we're not yanking your chain this time. Look, ma, no Roman numeral!
" That's a nice try at encouraging collective amnesia, but after a three-decade career built on commercial, political and sometimes racial opportunism, Stallone's latest comeback attempt is a dictionary-ready example of too little, too late. Which isn't to say is unlikable. It's a nice little movie -- clumsy, sometimes inept, but nice -- and it shows signs of long-delayed social and artistic evolution on the part of its writer-director-star.
The rest of the series trafficked in not-too-coded appeals to white working class racial paranoia (Apollo Creed, Clubber Lang) and even Reagan-era comic book jingoism (Russian hulk Ivan Drago), then lamely tried to cover its tracks with PC switcheroos (revealing that the champ's stereotypically Irish trainer, Mickey, was actually Jewish, and replacing him with Apollo, who played Good Negro opposite Clubber's growling, mohawked savage, then got beaten to death by Drago, giving Rocky another martyr to avenge) and it treated its real South Philly locations as a kind of nostalgic white ethnic backlot. This new movie gives Rocky a mixed-race teen to mentor and accepts changes in urban life with a no-big-deal shrug, and even acknowledges Philly's influx of Mexican-American immigrants; they dominate the staff of Rocky's vanity restaurant, despite brother-in-law Paulie (Burt Young) warning that they'll steal the silver. Stallone and cinematographer J.
Clark Mathis even color-codes the hero's old stomping ground (warm browns and oranges) and Rocky, Jr.'s impersonal world of vertical ice cube trays and gentrified row house neighborhoods (operating-room white, steel blue). Rocky himself remains Stallone's finest creation -- a big-hearted pug whose Popeye the Sailor malapropisms and sub-kindergarten observations rarely fail to earn a grin.
(Rocky describing an animal shelter: "This is where they keep, like, a wide variety of dogs.") And considering how long we've lived with this character, Stallone's decision to build Rocky's physical decline into the story gives the film an unexpected cornball heft. Ditto Stallone's decision to make Rocky a widower who's reluctant to pursue a potential new flame, a divorced fortysomething bartender named Marie (Geraldine Hughes), because he's still madly in love with Adrian (Talia Shire, seen briefly in flashback footage).
Hughes, like Shire before her, isn't given much of a character to play -- and her supposedly troubled relationship with her son, Steps (James Francis Kelly III), the aforementioned teen that Rocky semi-adopts, seems to have gotten chewed up in the editing room. But Hughes looks and sounds like a real person, not a Hollywood glamour-puss, and she deserves a medal of valor for getting through the series' single most cliched inspirational speech without cracking up onscreen. (The capper is, "They say the last thing to actually age on someone is their heart.
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