Creed - Review

Okay folks, here we have yet another boxing movie. Just hearing that, your mind begins to paint a picture in your head of what you are about to see. The hotshot rookie who needs to understand the meaning of friendship or love or passion or any other fairytale stuff to rise up and defeat the champion. Sounds familiar right? That seems to be the only storyline Hollywood knows about when it comes to boxing. So does Creed come along and totally shatter those tropes? No, but I am a firm believer that any story can be told if told in an entertaining way and I am glad to say that Creed is an entertaining movie.

Creed, of course, is the first spin-off of the famous Rocky franchise and we see the rise of Adonis Johnson (Johnson being his mother's name), the son of Rocky's former rival turned friend, Apollo Creed. This is where Creed stands out from the crowd. This film isn't so much a film about dreaming to win it all and climb to the top of the boxing world and become the champion, it's about finding your identity and forging your own path, even if you feel like you are stuck in someone else's shadow.

Adonis Creed has it all. Big house, fancy car, and a great steady paying job in Los Angeles, but he puts that behind him to start a life of boxing and starts fresh in Phillidelphia. There, he meets Rocky Balboa who becomes his new trainer, he meets a singer named Bianca and falls in love, and his boxing journey begins.

So why does this film work when at its core, it has the same general plot line of almost every boxing movie I have ever seen? A couple of reasons. One, as I stated before, this movie is about identity and it plays a major role in the film. Think about this, you want to go on a certain career path. Whether it be a boxer, a stockbroker, or even a film critic, and you discover that one of your parents, who you have never met before, is one of the most famous people in that profession. The amount of pressure you would have to live up to a legacy would be extremely intense. It's like me, an aspiring film critic, finding out that my real father was Roger Ebert. I would have nicknames like "Baby Ebert" or "Little Roger" or some stuff like that. So right off the bat, this film tackles the "underdog versus the champion" storyline from a different angle.

Creed also excels because of the relationships with its characters and the fact that this movie is part of an already famous franchise. Adonis Creed and Rocky Balboa form a father-son-like relationship and both of them have great chemistry together. Not only are these characters written well, but they are acted well too. Michael B. Jordan is great but man do I have to give it to Sylvester Stallone. Even in his late 60's, he brings it. One scene in particular which I won't spoil, he starts to get emotional and I'm not going to lie, it was extremely tough not to get emotional with him. He was fantastic. And the relationship he forms with Bianca seems very natural and you believe it. If I don't believe that two certain characters would fall in love in a movie and they do, it takes me right out of the movie. Luckily, this film gives us a believable and cute romance between Adonis and Bianca that works.

Lastly, this film is a part of the Rocky franchise so naturally, there are going to be some callbacks. But what this film does really well indicates that this is a new generation. Adonis looks up old fights on YouTube which were just clips from the first movie, and people recognize Rocky Balboa in public, so we know that the previous movies happened, but then we get a nice contrast between the aging ways of Rocky Balboa and Adonis Creed. There is a cute scene where Rocky writes down some drills for Adonis to do and Adonis simply takes a picture of it with his phone and walks away to which Rocky has this priceless look on his face. It's little details like that that make this movie work.

With great acting, a story that while seen before is still told well and great boxing sequences (one of which that is made to look like one continuous shot) Creed is definitely worth a watch even if you haven't seen a Rocky film before.