Creed II

The new Rocky franchise movie doesn’t open on the Rocky world but in the Ukraine. It focuses on the defeated Russian Ivan Drago and his bigger-chip-off-the-old bloc son Viktor.  
     Coming to see a Rocky flick we’re jolted to start in Drago’s world. But then we’re not living in the original Rocky’s world either. America is no longer the America — Nam war America — in which Rocky first taught his lesson that sometimes you don’t need to win. It’s enough to survive.  

  Present America has nothing of the hope, integrity and purpose that marked even that fractured America.  As America seems outside “America” this chapter starts in Kiev.

The strain of being outside is arguably the film’s driving theme. We meet Adonis Creed as he’s winning the heavyweight boxing title. But he feels no security in that No.One ranking, because he’s immediately challenged by Viktor, son of the Drago who a few movies ago killed Creed’s father Apollo.

Rocky himself is always outside, hoping to come in. We hear him before he walks on camera. The three-step climb into the ring is momentous, he intones. He lives a solitary life in a plain Philly apartment, with only Adonis to care for him. He lives like he lived at the outset, a loner, tossing his ball, crumpled hat and slouch. He owns a restaurant (Adrian’s) but he comes in at night to punch the dough — that’s all he kneads. 

Rocky has three emotional climaxes in the film: (i) the birth of Adonis’s daughter, his god-daughter; (ii) Adonis beating (spoiler alert) Viktor; and (iii) his own, long-alienated son greeting him at his door with “You want to come inside?”

Here everyone wants to come inside. Adonis feels twice compelled to fight Viktor because he has no other connection to his dead dad. He takes Rocky’s initial refusal to train him for the ill-advised fight as a personal betrayal, a father’s expulsion. In the (yeah, maudlin but hey…) graveyard scenes Rocky and Adonis soliloquize a connection to a dear departed. They need to feel in their dead family member’s presence. 

As it happens, Adrian remains a stronger presence in Rocky’s life than Drago’s wife is. She deserted her husband on his loss and repeats that when son Viktor seems about to lose. 

Adonis’s sweetie Bianca is a partially deaf professional singer. Their born-deaf daughter starts another kind of outsiderhood. But her mother and — thanks to Rocky’s tutorial on fatherhood — her father will totally embrace and include her. 

  Bringing in the excluded extends to the actors as well as to the characters. In addition to Rocky and the Creed family, the resurrections include Dolph Lundgren as Drago dad, Brigitte Nielsen (Stallone’s Ex) as Drago’s Ex, and Milo Ventimiglia as again Rocky’s son Bobby. 
     Paradoxically, our climactic sight of Rocky has him contentedly on the outside. His boy Adonis is in the chaotic ring celebrating his triumph. Rocky sits in ringside, taking it all in from a lower distance, detached, his back to us with “Creed” emblazoned on his jacket. Not Rocky but Creed. His ego is content, His creed has won another. He’s not in the ring because he has nothing to prove. Except for his suspended fatherhood.