The Doctor’s Diagnosis: B-
I’m not a big fan of the first two Creed movies, so I was pleasantly surprised by the superior level of mediocrity offered by this latest entry. While the first two movies suffer from numbingly boring characters, aside from a certain stallion of Italian descent, that problem is partially solved in Creed III with the introduction of the first genuinely interesting villain in the series (not counting, of course, the villains from the Rocky movies). While there are still a whole lot of problems here, the film manages to be just entertaining enough solely on the strength of Creed’s opponent.
The film opens with Creed (again played by Michael B. Jordan, who also directs this entry) now retired and running a boxing gym/promotion. All is well until he is visited by Damian “Diamond Dame” Anderson (played by Jonathan Majors), an old friend with whom he shares a shady past. The two were best friends and rival boxers as children, but were involved in an attack at a liquor store that resulted in Damian being arrested while Creed ran away. Now released from prison, Damian asks for help in restarting his life as a professional boxer. However, Damian is not as well-intentioned as he seems and Creed must ultimately step back into the ring to take the title back from his former friend.
If it seems like I skipped a lot of steps in that plot summary, that’s because 1. I did skip a lot of steps and 2. Damian’s meteoric rise to the heavyweight championship is kind of, well, stupid. In a plot twist that I’m willing to spoil because it’s both incredibly obvious and astonishingly stupid, Damian maneuvers his way into a title shot despite having zero boxing experience as an adult. They try to explain this by referencing the fact that Rocky was given a shot out of nowhere, but the comparison doesn’t work because Rocky was an active boxer; he just hadn’t been given a shot on the professional circuit. If Rocky went from 0 to 100, this dude goes from zero to fucking lightspeed. The boxing commission wouldn’t just take a guy off the street and put him in the ring against the heavyweight champion of the world. Arguably, that would be manslaughter. Damian wins the fight anyway, probably because the heavyweight champion looks like he weighs about 140 pounds, and then he turns on Creed.
Thematically, the film is fittingly aligned with Rocky III. Creed is now wealthy and comfortable, now having lost the eye of the tiger that he had in his youth. Damian is the tough-as-nails dude from the streets that forces Creed to regain his edge. We saw this before with Rocky and Clubber Lang, but Creed III does work quite well when it focuses on that dynamic and the broken friendship element (which was, obviously, not a part of Rocky III). The relationship and dynamic between these guys feel tense and real, adding a momentum that was sorely missing from the previous entries.
Unfortunately, the film doesn’t always focus on that relationship. Creed III feels both too long and incredibly rushed, particularly in the last act. The film gives far too much screentime to Creed’s family and a subplot about his deaf daughter and these extraneous elements add nothing to the main plot. No offense to the actors involved, particularly the young Mila Davis-Kent as the daughter, but I don’t care about these characters. When it finally comes time for the buildup to the final fight, the film is in an astonishing rush toward a conclusion with hardly any time between the announcement of the match and the match itself. It’s a jarring pacing problem that could have been solved by trimming the family drama and allowing more time to focus on the core conflict.
Jonathan Majors is the real driving force here and his performance is what single-handedly elevates this movie above the previous two. Honestly, I don’t know where the hell this guy came from. I had never even heard of him two months ago and now he’s been the only entertaining part of two of the biggest movies of 2023 (the other being his role as Kang in the otherwise forgettable Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania). While Michael B. Jordan is has the charisma of unflavored oatmeal, Majors is consistently threatening, personable and sometimes even sympathetic. When he does his full turn into a villain, it’s believable and sad and Jordan’s sudden disappointment and embarrassment is one of the few sparks of life that he shows during this series. If Majors can even make the Creed character temporarily interesting, that is quite a testament to the strength of his performance here. Majors was arrested between when I saw the film and when I’m writing this, so that throws a bit of a wrench into my praise of him, but it still doesn’t change the quality of his work here.
The elephant in the room is the absence of Rocky and, while he honestly isn’t missed too much, it is a bit of a distracting plot hole because his absence is never explained. There are only a couple of quick references to the fact that he exists and no explanation for why he isn’t there. In real life, Stallone has a long-standing dispute with one of the producers (Irwin Winkler) and decided to walk away from the film. There are several times, especially during the last act, that it makes little sense that Rocky wouldn’t show up. When considered as a singular film, the character’s absence doesn’t impact things. When considered as the ninth entry in a long-running series, it the character’s absence makes no sense and, considering how long we’ve been following the Rocky character, a sudden disappearance is a pretty damn anti-climactic conclusion for one of the most famous characters in American cinema.
For what is essentially Rocky IX, this movie is better than I expected it to be. Despite the pacing issues, Creed III is a step up over the last two movies almost entirely thanks to the performance of Jonathan Majors. It still isn’t close to capturing the drama of the more serious Rocky entries or the cartoonish fun of Rocky III and Rocky IV, but it is certainly better than Rocky V. That amounts to a generous B- grade.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creed_III#/media/File:Creed_III_poster.png
