Creed

Synopsis: Adonis “Donny” Creed (Michael B Jordan), the illegitimate son of Apollo Creed, ventures into the boxing ring and seeks out Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) to train him.

The Rocky films, at their best, are a kind of social realist take on a make-believe world, Ken Loach goes Hollywood almost. The idea of a nobody fighter being given a chance to take on a world champ is a kind of ridiculous Hollywood tale. But watch Rocky and see the seriousness with which it treats the subject. The focus is on the character, seeing Balboa move from a no-hoper thug to a man who realises he can’t win but works out a way to prove himself in spite of it. Go the distance. It was sad to see the heightened reality collapse into cartoon with instalments 3, 4 and 5, but the last Rocky film, Rocky Balboa, returned to the essence of the original. A character study treated seriously, immersed in a situation that objectively is ridiculous. And yet, you never notice, because when it walks that line, a Rocky film is sublime.

Which brings us to Creed, an attempt to bring new blood to the franchise and attract a new audience. Or at least, that’s what the cynic in me thought. But instead we’re treated to a film which understands the dance between serious character study and storybook plot machinations.

We meet the young Adonis as a child in a youth detention centre, beating the snot out of every kid who insults the memory of his dead mother. But then a woman shows up and reveals that she’s Apollo Creed’s widow, and she’d like to adopt him. Cut to the present day and Donny Johnson, as he prefers to be known, divides his time between boxing matches in Mexico and working in an office and living in the mansion paid for by his father’s career. But he’s obsessed by his absent father, shadow boxing YouTube videos of Creed’s famous fights. Nobody in LA will train him, as his father died in the ring. So he goes to Philadelphia, finds Rocky and persuades him to train him. From there, he trains, fights, and gets a shot at the world champion. To the credit of the screenwriters, the plot makes the logic of this, improbably trajectory surprisingly plausible. And Donny’s motivation, his drive, makes sense too, as does his anger and struggle to reconcile with the shadow his father’s name casts. It’s something that was handled differently, but equally well, in Rocky Balboa.

Creed is a really good film, with uniformly great acting and some great fight cinematography. There’s a set-piece boxing match in the middle of the film handled as a single take that is very impressive. At this point, single take scenes are starting to feel a bit faddish, but this one justifies its existence. All the fights are well handled, and the script spends the time building up to each fight, giving each its own motivation and conflicts. There’s a few callbacks to Rocky in theme and plot, maybe a few too many for its own good, but Creed does an admirable job of standing on its own, stepping out of its begetter’s shadow.

 

 

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