Creed III

Okay, maybe guts aren't an organ, but there are things missing in this movie. Those things and Sylvester Stallone. He's missing, and his absence is felt, when often this movie is trying so hard to make you do just that, feel.

With no heart and no guts, it's hard to do that.

The boxing scenes here feel like a video game and the non-boxing scenes feel like a Lifetime movie.

The only reason this movie is a seven and not a six, is because of the screen presence and charisma of both Michael B. Jordan and Jonathan Majors. They are incredible.

But there is no grit. No toughness. It's too glossy.

It's nice to have a running time of under two hours. It is. But this story is unbelievable with the sudden ascent of the antagonist.

With the time given, a nice Rocky montage with cheesy rock music or even rap music would've been an effective shoutout.

The movie also takes way too long to get to the root cause of the legal incident that pulled these two guys apart as young men as well.

This is the weakest Creed film by far.

In the Rockyverse it's right at the bottom there with Rocky V.

In fighting terms this portion of the Creed trilogy is remarkably underweight at weigh-in.

The 'Creed' boxing actioner melodrama series has none of the magic of the early 'Rocky' films that it span off from - with "Creed III" a typical example. Titular champ Michael B Jordan (charismaless - also on his directorial debut here) retires to a dream LA home with pop star wife Tessa Thompson, but then moody childhood pal Jonathan Majors (good - but no Mr T) re-emerges after 18yrs in jail. Via Keenan Coogler & Zach Baylin's hole-filled, cartoonish, short-cutting writing Majors becomes Jordan's nemesis, for whom he must return to the ring, to fight in a showdown finale. As lamely cheesie as it sounds it still has some Hollywood polish, but 'Creed' is definitely no 'Rocky'.

Wanted to like this film and to be honest i think it was a good idea to finally move away from the Rocky character- but this falls flat on its face.

The premise is good and it starts off okay but it becomes really muddled really fast. If Adonis and Dame are literally like brothers why do they have next to no chemistry? Do we root for Dame or is he just the antagonist? In all seriousness Rocky V was poor but it actually did this storyline so much better.

Training sequences and the fights were the worst across all the Rocky/Creed series- yes visually they look great but there is no feel of a boxing match, no flow, no heart pounding sense of threat or danger. The less said about the CGI sequence the better- completely deflated the climax of the fight and robbed us of any investment we had left.

If there is going to be a Creed IV, Stallone needs to have a greater involvement. Yes you can call the previous Rocky/Creed films generic and predictable but they're also crowd-pleasing and above all fun and entertaining - and at the end of the day thats what it comes down to.

This is a real departure from other movies in the Rocky-verse. The absence of Stallone's input (ignore the 'produced by' credit to Stallone - he wasn't involved) is felt throughout the films style, writing, direction and lack of any sentimentality.

It simply doesn't feel like a Rocky/Creed movie, it's darker, more angry, more miserable and a lot less fun. But worst of all you just don't care about any of the characters...and that means no hairs on the back of your neck as you approach fight night.

On the fight, the way it was shot is very stylistic with heavy CGI and feels further removed from reality than the other movies (and hey - they weren't realistic!).

If you forget it's Creed or part of the Rocky-verse, on its own it's an 'ok' film. Stack it up against what's been before and after what was a really entertaining first and second Creed instalment/s - it's a bad movie.

Hopefully that's it now, unless Stallone gets back involved...then maybe.

The performances of this movie is what saves it from being a complete flop. The Creed franchise suffers from trying to live up to what Stallone accomplished with rocky 1-4. And this is the problem with films today. The first two creeds had that same grit feel of the rocky franchise and this movie did not have that. The scenes were anticlimactic and generic. The story seemed to suffer from not having enough source material and first time director Michael B Jordan made the mistake of thinking this script was good enough without even mentioning rocky. Ok they mentioned him once. Yeah that's it, once. Which is ironic because the whole story is based on what got him here to this point. I also didn't like that they went thr MCU route, CGI should not exist in this world. Sorry had to say it.