Creed III

Up to this day Rocky V was considered teh worse movies in the Rocky-verse. Actually i also enjoyed Rocky V. It didnt finish in a ring but the characterization of Don King and a real life Pro-champ boxer Tommy Morrison gave a nice nuance.

Anyway now it is Creed 3. I like the first one a lot, Creed 2 was one of the best movies in Rocky-verse for me. But this one is the worse Rocky-verse movie. In fact there is no single Rocky movie soul in it. And you miss Rocky heavily in each scene. And it is not because of the nostalgia but because of the utter-mess. I mean why they kicked Sly out of a very brilliant on-going business i dont know.

I feel like too much corporation greed destroyed creed and Rocky soul.

Direction and writing was so blunt, no emotion of characterization. It is one of the you-already-saw it movies.

Acting Michael B Jordan sometimes hits and sometimes miss. I liked his performance at Black Panther 2 but here he was just without any specific direction.

Drama is exactly the copy cat of Creed I and II. Nothing new. I dont even know why they made this movie. After the hype will be over people will see the true product and give different credits.

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.

The first half of Creed III was decent and the initial premise of a childhood friend opened up some interesting possibilities for the story. But it sadly wasn't developed well enough and the movie ends up feeling somewhat of a wasted opportunity. By the end, it has the feeling of one of those dime-a-dozen fighting movies that didn't quite hit the mark in any memorable way.

The actors all did a good job however, and I didn't really notice that Rocky wasn't around. It was almost refreshing to see Creed and the other characters take their first independent steps, without the guiding hand or strong presence of Stallone. Things felt promising early on in the movie and it was probably the good acting which prevented the movie from being a complete flop.

Around the half way point unfortunately cracks started to appear in the story. The childhood friend angle just wasn't used to best effect, in a convincing way. Things just descend into a series of somewhat unrealistic and almost cliched interactions between the main characters. The story sort of dwindles into mediocrity.

Overall still reasonably entertaining. Good acting, decent directing/cinematography. Fight scenes not bad. Ultimately a weak screenplay turned what could have been a good Creed movie into the least impressive one so far in the franchise.

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.

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.