Just as Sylvester Stallone seized the directorial reigns of the Rocky franchise after its Oscar-winning first entry, headliner Michael B. Jordan gets behind the camera for Creed III, a threequel in which his Adonis Creed faces off against yet another titanic foe. Whereas Stallone temporarily steered things into goofy cartoonishness, Jordan maintains the steady course charted by his two predecessors, sticking to the bedrock formula pioneered by the series for the past five decades. It’s easy to see the film’s punches coming before they’re thrown, but that doesn’t lessen their wallop when they land.
Jordan shoots Creed III relatively straight, save for an opening match in which slow-motion is cannily used to suggest heavyweight champion Adonis Creed’s (Jordan) tactical perceptiveness, and a finale that’s bogged down by an on-the-nose CGI-ified interlude marred by distracting environmental effects.
For the most part, the star/director recognizes that there’s no need to fix what isn’t broken, and his clean and economical stewardship allows the proceedings to fixate on its characters, beginning with Adonis, who, following another pugilistic triumph, opts to hang up his gloves and settle into retirement with his music superstar wife Bianca (Tessa Thompson) and their daughter Amara (Mila Davis-Kent).
Creed’s concentration quickly turns to making a boatload of money by helping his trainer Tony “Little Duke” Evers (Wood Harris) hone new heavyweight champ Felix (Teófimo López) into an unstoppable (and lucrative) force in the ring. His efforts, though, are immediately mucked up by the arrival in Los Angeles of Damian “Dame” Anderson (Jonathan Majors), a former highly touted Golden Gloves-winning amateur whom Adonis ran with back in the day, until a 2002 liquor store calamity sent them on divergent paths.
Creed III shows us glimpses of that incident but withholds full details until its last act. What is clear is that, in the aftermath of that fateful night, Dame wound up in prison and, now released, wants to realize the dream that was stolen from him 18 years earlier: a shot at the title.
Dame comes across as a sad and broken man during his initial sit-down with Adonis, but Majors—Hollywood’s villain du jour after his nefarious turn as Kang the Conqueror in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania—has a gift for casting such hurt as a catalyst for apocalyptic fury, and it’s not long before the ex-con is stating his grand professional intentions and, moreover, his opinion that Adonis owes him this “impossible” opportunity.
Majors radiates volatility whether he’s smiling or frowning, and as with his recent Marvel outing, he’s the most charismatic aspect of Creed III, embodying Dame as a Clubber Lang variant fueled by long-held resentment and anger. That the film teases the reveal of his insanely formidable physique until its midway point only amplifies one’s impression of Dame as a rampaging wolf eager to shed his sheep’s clothing.
It’s to Jordan’s credit that he makes the film’s old moves feel fresh—a trick he and screenwriters Keenan Coogler and Zach Baylin accomplish by recognizing that the Rocky template is almost invincibly sturdy. Dame slowly ingratiates himself into Adonis and Bianca’s life, gently (and then not-so-gently) taunting them about their joint decisions to walk away from their beloved careers (Bianca, due to progressive hearing loss, is now a producer rather than a singer).
When Felix’s big-ticket opponent Viktor Drago (Florian Munteanu) is injured during a suspicious attack at a record label party, Adonis—ashamed about abandoning his friend when they were kids—gives Dame a chance to show the world what he’s made of, which turns out to be a ton of rage and a concurrent willingness to fight dirty to achieve the glory he craves.
If you’ve seen any of these movies, you know precisely what Creed III has in store, including with regards to Adonis’ loving mother Mary Anne (Phylicia Rashad), who in her first scene shrugs off the recent stroke she suffered and, in doing so, telegraphs her Mickey and Apollo-style destiny.
Once Dame is in the boxing-world driver’s seat, he’s free to drop the guilt-trip routine toward Adonis and embrace his inner scoundrel, highlighted by his calling into Stephen A. Smith’s First Take to mock Adonis as a crybaby and a coward, thereby motivating the hero to return to the ring for one more go-round.
Set at Dodger Stadium, that clash is as inevitable as its outcome is preordained. Jordan works hard to make it count, his camera getting up-close-and-personal with the athletes as they trade body blows, grimace and scowl at each other, and—during the aforementioned flourish-heavy sequence—battle not only each other but the adolescent demons that helped propel them to this moment in the spotlight.
Adonis’ fears about being soft and spineless are conventional hang-ups that he must invariably overcome. Yet to a greater degree than Stallone did in Rocky III and IV, Jordan humanizes his protagonist instead of letting him morph into an outright superhero. At times, one actually wishes for a bit more outsized color and flair from Adonis (and the film); such hackneyed material, after all, can only be taken so seriously.
Still, Adonis’ rapport with Amara and Bianca is easygoing and sweet, and it makes up for the fact that the fighter’s lessons to his daughter about how boxing is about “timing, focus, and control” rather than violence—a message necessitated by the girl’s habit of knocking out school bullies—isn’t really proven by the action at hand. Creed III is about long-hidden blasts from the past, and the need to sometimes solve pesky problems by pummeling them as brutally as possible, and recurring talk to the contrary, the film doesn’t pretend that its central conflict can be solved any other way.
As with so many sports dramas, Creed III’s Achilles heel is dreadful color commentary that sounds scripted and does little more than dispense basic (and unnecessary) exposition; the switch from HBO to Showtime branding for the big bouts also costs the film the participation of boxing’s best voice, Jim Lampley. Nonetheless, Jordan’s noble charisma and Majors’ seething wrath are more than enough to get this latest franchise installment to the end of its final round.
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