Rocky road
There are three entirely different ways we can look at Creed III, and the film is more or less of a success or a failure based on which one we pick. Starting from the most failed and going up: as the trilogy-capper to a story begun in 2015's exceptionally great boxing movie Creed and 2018's boringly ordinary boxing Creed II, it's perfectly adequate. Better than the second, worst than the first, and that's pretty much the best-case scenario it was worth hoping for. As the ninth film in the 47-year-old Rocky franchise, it's decidedly better than it ought to be, remarkably good at keeping the basic material of the formula fresh (and there's no formula quite as refined and unyielding in its agedness as the formula of a boxing movie), even as it offers some very distinct echoes of Rocky III, one of more "yep, this is a Rocky movie" entries in the series. And as the directorial debut of its star, Michael B. Jordan, it's pretty promising, with the asterisk that we use the word "promising" when we mean "not actually all that good in and of itself. He's got good instincts: this is very much a movie that comes from a creative place, almost recklessly so. And his visual sense is strong, tapping into the need of a series like this to keep churning out big, self-consciously iconic imagery every few minutes, so we feel the weight of Boxing As Way Of Being, and How To Be A Man In These Changing Times and all pressing down on our eyeballs. There's always the question, when an actor sits in the director's chair for the first time, if we're going to get a big indulgent exercise in drama class exercises, or if we're actually going to get a movie, and if anything, I wish Jordan had given more attention to his castmates; there are a lot of performances that rise up to the level of "gets the job done" and go no further, and a couple of absolutely crucial performances that I don't even think reach that height.
And that's part of the "not actually all that good" part of things: Jordan's instinct for storytelling, including character work, isn't nearly as immediately impressive as his instinct for visuals. And of course, we need at this point to mention the other people involved in all of this: cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau and editors Jessica Baclesse and Tyler Nelson on the one hand, and screenwriters Keenan Coogler & Zach Baylin (adapting and refining a story originally drafted by Ryan Coogler, Keenan's brother, and the genius behind the first Creed), any one of whom could deserve some credit or blame for what parts of this work or don't work. Whatever parentage got it there, the point remains: Creed III looks pretty slick, but it's pretty clunky in movement, it has a remarkable inability to manage tone, and there's a lot of "this is happening because we needed it to happen" leaps in the screenplay.
The basics of the thing: many years ago, when he was a kid, Adonis "Donnie" Creed (Jordan) had a good friend, Damien "Dame" Anderson* (Jonathan Majors), who has spent the last 20-odd years languishing in prison - the exact, precise details are held for later, but it's pretty clear from the flashback that opens the movie that in 2002, Little Dame (Spence Moore II, who looks nothing at all like Majors) flashed a gun to protect Littler Donnie (Thaddeus James Mixson, Jr, who looks tolerably like Jordan) from getting beat up, and was sent to prison for it, while Donnie fled the scene before he was caught. Now, in 2023, Donnie is a retired heavyweight champion, one of the most celebrated boxers of the day, and this means he has more or less explicitly stolen Dame's life, since the only thing Dame dreamed of was becoming a professional boxer, when Donnie had no apparent designs on doing so. And this means, of course, that when Dame gets released from prison, he's not afraid to drop some extremely big hints that Donnie owes him, and Donnie has enough deeply-buried guilt in his soul to agree.
So far, so good: complete boilerplate, of course, but that's what sports movies are for. Creed III starts to get itself a little tangled up when it comes to deciding what to do with these two character arcs it has planted: many of the film's big tonal issues and storytelling hiccups come because it has, on the one hand, presented Dame as someone who is fundamentally reasonable and correct to be aggrieved, and that it's mostly sad and embarrassing that he still wants to make it as a boxer, but in a deeply human way. And on the other hand, it needs very much to make Dame a conniving sociopath whose out-of-control behavior, unjustified and aimless resentment, and tendency toward violence must be shut down and shoved out of polite society, and this can of course only happen if Donnie meets him... in the boxing ring. In short, your basic "oops, you made the villain too sympathetic, so now we have to turn him into a bloodthirsty savage out of nowhere to avoid making the hero look like a dick", which is especially funny because Jordan himself has been on the opposite side of that equation, in Black Panther. It leads to the aforementioned tonal messiness, since it's hard to guess at any given moment whether the film is going to invite us to feel sorry for Dame or hiss at him, and there are at least a couple of moments where the film walks extremely close to just outright saying "well, you know, those ex-cons, there's no integrating them back into polite society", which was certainly not a sentiment I'd have expected from a Creed movie. Majors is doing some excellent work in tying all of these conflicting narrative impulses into a character: it's easily the best he's been in a movie, with a rule perfectly suited to his skill set and physicality. And at the same time, he's being very careful not to steal scenes from Jordan, which is actually kind of an achievement given how low-energy Jordan is playing a lot of the scenes in the early part of the movie. Maybe he's done with the character, maybe he was focused on the fighting scenes; either way, he's just kind of there, only really perking up when the film shifts midway through to pull Donnie out of retirement and make him confront his own tendency towards violence.
The other big problem, which isn't new to Creed III, is that these films have just been thuddingly bad at incorporating Donnie's wife Bianca (Tessa Thompson) into the proceedings, and this time there's a child as well, Amara (Mila Davis-Kent), and you can just feel the film sigh in dismay every time it returns to those characters. Thompson is a better actor than this material, and she's not trying to hide the fact that she knows it; if Jordan's work is kind of low-energy, Thompson's is outright dead.
Anyway, I've been talking about it as a Creed sequel, and I already said that was the worst framing to talk about it. As a boxing movie, Creed III is pretty damn solid, with clearly-delineated messages about masculine energy that needs to be watched closely before it turns destructive, a good balance between Good Donnie and Evil Mirror Donnie in the form of Dame, and some terrific fighting scenes. Jordan has talked about how his inspiration for how to stage the action in Creed III was Japanese animation, and I can't always see it. But he clearly had some very distinct ideas for how to distinguish each of the big fights, and how to stage each one of them in a very different register that matches their position in the story. This leads to some fearlessly weird choices: his concept for the last fight (on the theme of "will Donnie find the strength inside to overcome his guilt and fear?") strikes me as being most readily described as "what if Wild Strawberries was a boxing movie?" and I like that Creed III isn't too self-conscious to go to such a strange place, even if I'm not at all sure it "works". It's still an incredibly striking sequence that I imagine will remain at the forefront of my brain no matter how much else I see in 2023. Meanwhile, the central fight is one of the best boxing matches in Rocky history, breaking down the act of boxing into analytical fragments so that we can clearly read what we're seeing and understand it as a collection of choices made by the characters and pure, animal instinct, jostling with each other. The point is, Creed III has "it" where it needs to, and even when it struggles, it's grappling with a fairly interesting and ambivalent set of ideas about how much we owe our past selves, and what happens if we think we owe more than we do. It's extremely watchable, when we come right down to it, watchable and thoughtful.
Reviews in this series
Creed (Coogler, 2015)
Creed II (Caple Jr, 2018)
Creed III (Jordan, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*I'm extremely annoyed that "Dame" was already a nickname, for otherwise no force in the universe could have prevented me from claiming that his name was Dame "Judith" Anderson, and never ever letting go of that bit.
And that's part of the "not actually all that good" part of things: Jordan's instinct for storytelling, including character work, isn't nearly as immediately impressive as his instinct for visuals. And of course, we need at this point to mention the other people involved in all of this: cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau and editors Jessica Baclesse and Tyler Nelson on the one hand, and screenwriters Keenan Coogler & Zach Baylin (adapting and refining a story originally drafted by Ryan Coogler, Keenan's brother, and the genius behind the first Creed), any one of whom could deserve some credit or blame for what parts of this work or don't work. Whatever parentage got it there, the point remains: Creed III looks pretty slick, but it's pretty clunky in movement, it has a remarkable inability to manage tone, and there's a lot of "this is happening because we needed it to happen" leaps in the screenplay.
The basics of the thing: many years ago, when he was a kid, Adonis "Donnie" Creed (Jordan) had a good friend, Damien "Dame" Anderson* (Jonathan Majors), who has spent the last 20-odd years languishing in prison - the exact, precise details are held for later, but it's pretty clear from the flashback that opens the movie that in 2002, Little Dame (Spence Moore II, who looks nothing at all like Majors) flashed a gun to protect Littler Donnie (Thaddeus James Mixson, Jr, who looks tolerably like Jordan) from getting beat up, and was sent to prison for it, while Donnie fled the scene before he was caught. Now, in 2023, Donnie is a retired heavyweight champion, one of the most celebrated boxers of the day, and this means he has more or less explicitly stolen Dame's life, since the only thing Dame dreamed of was becoming a professional boxer, when Donnie had no apparent designs on doing so. And this means, of course, that when Dame gets released from prison, he's not afraid to drop some extremely big hints that Donnie owes him, and Donnie has enough deeply-buried guilt in his soul to agree.
So far, so good: complete boilerplate, of course, but that's what sports movies are for. Creed III starts to get itself a little tangled up when it comes to deciding what to do with these two character arcs it has planted: many of the film's big tonal issues and storytelling hiccups come because it has, on the one hand, presented Dame as someone who is fundamentally reasonable and correct to be aggrieved, and that it's mostly sad and embarrassing that he still wants to make it as a boxer, but in a deeply human way. And on the other hand, it needs very much to make Dame a conniving sociopath whose out-of-control behavior, unjustified and aimless resentment, and tendency toward violence must be shut down and shoved out of polite society, and this can of course only happen if Donnie meets him... in the boxing ring. In short, your basic "oops, you made the villain too sympathetic, so now we have to turn him into a bloodthirsty savage out of nowhere to avoid making the hero look like a dick", which is especially funny because Jordan himself has been on the opposite side of that equation, in Black Panther. It leads to the aforementioned tonal messiness, since it's hard to guess at any given moment whether the film is going to invite us to feel sorry for Dame or hiss at him, and there are at least a couple of moments where the film walks extremely close to just outright saying "well, you know, those ex-cons, there's no integrating them back into polite society", which was certainly not a sentiment I'd have expected from a Creed movie. Majors is doing some excellent work in tying all of these conflicting narrative impulses into a character: it's easily the best he's been in a movie, with a rule perfectly suited to his skill set and physicality. And at the same time, he's being very careful not to steal scenes from Jordan, which is actually kind of an achievement given how low-energy Jordan is playing a lot of the scenes in the early part of the movie. Maybe he's done with the character, maybe he was focused on the fighting scenes; either way, he's just kind of there, only really perking up when the film shifts midway through to pull Donnie out of retirement and make him confront his own tendency towards violence.
The other big problem, which isn't new to Creed III, is that these films have just been thuddingly bad at incorporating Donnie's wife Bianca (Tessa Thompson) into the proceedings, and this time there's a child as well, Amara (Mila Davis-Kent), and you can just feel the film sigh in dismay every time it returns to those characters. Thompson is a better actor than this material, and she's not trying to hide the fact that she knows it; if Jordan's work is kind of low-energy, Thompson's is outright dead.
Anyway, I've been talking about it as a Creed sequel, and I already said that was the worst framing to talk about it. As a boxing movie, Creed III is pretty damn solid, with clearly-delineated messages about masculine energy that needs to be watched closely before it turns destructive, a good balance between Good Donnie and Evil Mirror Donnie in the form of Dame, and some terrific fighting scenes. Jordan has talked about how his inspiration for how to stage the action in Creed III was Japanese animation, and I can't always see it. But he clearly had some very distinct ideas for how to distinguish each of the big fights, and how to stage each one of them in a very different register that matches their position in the story. This leads to some fearlessly weird choices: his concept for the last fight (on the theme of "will Donnie find the strength inside to overcome his guilt and fear?") strikes me as being most readily described as "what if Wild Strawberries was a boxing movie?" and I like that Creed III isn't too self-conscious to go to such a strange place, even if I'm not at all sure it "works". It's still an incredibly striking sequence that I imagine will remain at the forefront of my brain no matter how much else I see in 2023. Meanwhile, the central fight is one of the best boxing matches in Rocky history, breaking down the act of boxing into analytical fragments so that we can clearly read what we're seeing and understand it as a collection of choices made by the characters and pure, animal instinct, jostling with each other. The point is, Creed III has "it" where it needs to, and even when it struggles, it's grappling with a fairly interesting and ambivalent set of ideas about how much we owe our past selves, and what happens if we think we owe more than we do. It's extremely watchable, when we come right down to it, watchable and thoughtful.
Reviews in this series
Creed (Coogler, 2015)
Creed II (Caple Jr, 2018)
Creed III (Jordan, 2023)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
*I'm extremely annoyed that "Dame" was already a nickname, for otherwise no force in the universe could have prevented me from claiming that his name was Dame "Judith" Anderson, and never ever letting go of that bit.
Categories: sports films, worthy sequels
