Decent enough, but adheres too rigidly to the Rocky template

Rating: 6/10 (15 December 2018)

Creed (2015) was probably the best of the remakequels (ostensible sequels that are, for all intents and purposes, remakes) that came out in the mid-2010s, and was the first Rocky film not written by Sylvester Stallone, and not directed by either Stallone or John G. Avildsen. After Rocky Balboa (2006) did the seemingly impossible, redeeming and concluding the franchise after the damage done by Rocky V (1990), Creed did something even more unlikely - revitalising the franchise with Rocky himself as a supporting character. For the sequel, Stallone is back as a writer (sharing credit with Juel Taylor, from a story by Sascha Penn and Cheo Hodari Coker), with Steven Caple Jr. directing. Whereas Creed was essentially a remake of the original Rocky (1976), Creed II is more of a combination of Rocky III (1982) and Rocky IV (1985), with some elements from Rocky II (1979), and whilst it hits all the beats one expects from a Rocky movie, the problem is that it hits them so slavishly, and does little else. It also, perhaps inevitably, suffers badly in comparison to its predecessor, especially in terms of direction - whereas Ryan Coogler's directorial work was assured, distinctive, and inventive, Caple Jr.'s is pedestrian and functional. Had it strayed from the formula just a tad, the way Creed did, the way Rocky Balboa did, it would have been a much better film. The kernel for a terrific film is there, but the execution is not; it features a litany of clichés; it's dull and repetitive; and the antagonist's subplot is infinitely more compelling than the main plot.
In Rocky IV, former WBC Heavyweight Champion Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) was killed in the ring during an exhibition bout against Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren). Determined to avenge the loss of his best friend, reigning champion Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) travelled to Moscow, where he defeated Drago. 33 years later, Ivan's son, Viktor (the man-mountain that is (Florian Munteanu), is training as a professional boxer in Ukraine. Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, three years after his professional debut, Apollo's son, Adonis (Michael B. Jordan), is preparing for a championship bout. Upon winning the title, Adonis proposes to his girlfriend, Bianca Taylor (Tessa Thompson), who says yes. Life seems perfect. That is until Viktor and Ivan head to the US and issue a very public challenge.
From an aesthetic point of view, Creed II is largely unremarkable (there's certainly nothing as epic as the single-shot fight from the first film), but one aspect that did stand out is the sound. As the first film established, Bianca is losing her hearing, something which is manifested in the aural design of Creed II several times. At the start of the film, for example, as Bianca walks through the backstage area prior to the title fight, the sound of the crowd is soft and distanced until she puts in her hearing aid. Later, when Adonis is training in a swimming pool, Bianca and his mother, Mary Anne (Phylicia Rashad), are talking at another location, with their conversation carrying over his scenes. However, every time he goes below the water, the sound of their voices dulls as if it were diegetic. When Adonis is knocked down during his bout with Viktor, all sound is pulled from the film, only returning when he locks eyes with Bianca in the crowd. Even Adonis's marriage proposal involves her hearing aid.
Thematically, legacy is a huge issue in Creed II, particularly as it relates to fathers and sons - most notably Apollo and Adonis, and Ivan and Viktor. Rocky himself is something of a surrogate father to Adonis, and is estranged from his own son, Robert (Milo Ventimiglia), and a grandson he has never met. Whilst Creed saw Adonis use boxing as a way to symbolically bond with a father he never knew, Creed II is more concerned with the emotionally fraught terrain that can result when fathers try to live vicariously through their sons, and when sons must live with their father's failures. Everything Viktor does, for example, is an attempt to earn Ivan's approval, whilst Ivan sees Viktor as the only way to atone for what happened to him after losing to Rocky.
Indeed, the depiction of the Dragos in general is especially interesting, and is both one of the best aspects of the film, and one of the most problematic. In Rocky IV, Ivan was a cartoon villain, a badly written, pseudo-xenophobic hyperbole of what some Americans seemed to think Soviets were like. He was barely one-dimensional. In Creed II, he's still relatively thin as a character, but Lundgren is given enough room to portray him as essentially broken, living on nothing but bitterness, resentment, and shame. When he meets up with Rocky in the latter's restaurant, promising, "my son will break your boy", he comes across as more pathetic than anything else, a million miles from the almost automaton-like warrior of three decades prior. When Ivan mentions their fight, Rocky tries to dismiss it, "that's like a million years ago." Ivan, however, replies, "but just yesterday to me." One gets the impression that from the moment of his loss he's been waiting for this, seeing his son as nothing more than the delivery method of his vengeance. Ivan has raised Viktor in pure hate, teaching him that the only thing that matters is winning, but you can see in every move that Viktor is far more concerned with earning his father's respect - winning as an end unto itself means relatively little to him. There's a lot of pathos in that, and both Lundgren and Munteanu act the hell out of the complex dynamic. Working with Stallone for the fifth time, Lundgren's understated and subtle performance is easily the best of his career, and the best in the film, with the quietness that spoke to lack of interiority in the previous film, here suggesting a deeply felt pain.
The training montages also do something very interesting in respect to Viktor. Showing him jogging through economically impoverished communities, stacking crates, lugging around bags of cement, and working with less than state-of-the-art equipment, the parallel is not to Ivan, who trained with hi-tech gizmos and gadgets in Rocky IV, but to Rocky's training in the original film. Indeed, whilst Adonis lives in a luxury apartment, Viktor and Ivan live in a dingy bedsit in Ukraine that recalls Rocky's original digs in Philadelphia.
The problem with all of this is that the Dragos' story is by far the most compelling one in the film. One should not come away from a film named Creed II wishing there had been less Creed and more of the antagonists. Set against the complex and fascinating Drago family drama, Creed and Bianca's story is pretty insipid. The most dramatic and heartfelt moments of the film involve Ivan and Viktor, and the long middle section where Creed falls into a depression seems to go on forever; the whole time we were watching him fall apart, I was yearning to get back to the Dragos.
And this feeds into the film's most egregious problems - its rigid adhesion to the Rocky template, and the concomitant predictability. Chances are that everything you think might happen in Creed II does, as the film makes no attempt whatsoever to be original. Aside from the Drago subplot, there is nothing here that we haven't seen before. Granted, the Rocky franchise has always tended to wear its predictability like a badge of honour, and the core template does undoubtedly work. But even when a film adheres to that template, one shouldn't be able to predict each narrative beat with near perfect accuracy. Even Rocky V, as awful as it was, tried something new, culminating with a street fight rather than an in-ring bout. It didn't even remotely work, but the thinking behind it was admirable. Aside from two unexpected cameos, Creed II never once caught me off-guard, doing nothing original, unexpected, or in any way daring. And because of that, for large portions of the runtime, particularly the middle section, the film is interminably boring.
Even the boxing itself is not especially well-done. Kramer Morgenthau's cinematography is fine, but nothing special, and pales in comparison to Maryse Alberti's work in the first film. Aside from Raging Bull (1980) and Ali (2001), both visually unique in their own ways, Creed is arguably the most technically proficient boxing movie in terms of in-ring competition. Creed II, however, shoots all the fights very conventionally, holding a fairly uniform three-quarters distance from the actors, with Caple Jr.'s only trick seeming to be slow-motion, which he grossly over-uses. This has the effect of making the fights seem repetitive, even when the story being told is different (which isn't helped by the fact that Ivan tells Viktor to "break him" about 153 times).
Although there are some laudable elements here, Creed II is a disappointment in almost every way, from the dull and soulless domestic scenes to a dénouement that goes beyond suspension-of-disbelief, with not a hint of unpredictability. By deconstructing the Rocky template, Creed found its way to unexpected thematic depths, whereas Creed II exists entirely on the surface. Sure, the Rocky melodrama is there, the Rocky fights are there, the Stallone one-liners are there, but with a narrative focused almost entirely on the less interesting characters, this has to go down as a missed opportunity. Apart from the Drago subplot, everything is by-the-numbers. Yes, we care about these characters, but that's primarily because of the previous films, and whereas Creed forged a path very much its own, Creed II returns us to the safety of the overly familiar.