Rocky and Apollo's son confront the ghosts in their lives

Rating: 8/10 (1 December 2015)

Creed is about coming to terms with your ghosts. We find ourselves by dealing with our past and its formidable shadows.
The film itself deals with the shadow of the Rocky series. Adonis Johnson, nee Creed, retraces Rocky Balboa's training methods, fight scenes, ambition and fortuitous championship offer. The huge champion Brit visually recalls Dolph Lundgren's Russian brute Drago in Rocky IV, with the same conversion of the huge audience from hiss to cheer. Creed has the same conclusion the Vietnam War-era first Rocky had: sometimes surviving is more important than winning. America keeps learning that anew.
Adonis Johnson doesn't know he's Apollo Creed's son till Apollo's widow comes to take him out of juvenile detention. The kid has the instincts and temper of a fighter, so discovering his father legitimizes him.
Mary Ann Creed raises him in her posh Los Angeles home and he grows into a successful finance executive. That career he chucks to follow in his father's footsteps. When he shadow boxes in front of a Youtube fight tape, Adonis slips into Rocky's position to attack his absent father.
Adonis takes on his father's brutish profession to find himself, preferring to go by his mother's name Johnson, to make his name on his own. For his big title match Mary Ann sends him Old Glory shorts with Creed on the front waistband and Johnson on the back. In fighting Adonis discovers his identity and defines his relationship to both his parents.
Rocky also lives among his ghosts. Wife Adrian exists only as the name of his restaurant and the graveyard site where he goes every day to deposit a rose, talk about his life and read the paper. The young Creed's request he train him revives Rocky's feeling for Apollo and gives him a new life, back at the ring. Rocky initially refuses cancer treatment because it pained and failed Adrian. He feels he has nothing more to live for. But his new protégé revives Rocky's interest in life so they spur each other on to their respective fights. If Rocky's own son fled the Balboa shadow, Apollo's son gives Rocky the successor he never had — and Adonis the father he never knew.
Mary Ann works on a couple of levels of ghost-wrestling. In tracking and adopting her husband's illegitimate son she comes to terms with Apollo's betrayal. She fails to dissuade the gifted boy from pursuing his father's more brutal career — though if the kid managed hedge funds, that's a debatable point — but she remains a loving influence on him. On another level, Mary Ann is played by Phylicia Rashad. Her matriarchal screen image began with The Cosby Show, whose father figure has also been redefined by time. This mother redeems the myth of that one.
Creed's love interest Bianca provides a variation on that theme: living with the future. She's a rock singer and musician who knows she will lose her hearing. She defines herself by how she handles that ghost of deafness future. She lives her music intensely and prepares for that loss with hearing aids, learning sign language, but mainly by asserting her will and not accepting premature defeat. In her own fight she's going Creed's 12 rounds too and will lose — but by going the distance, winning.