more than adequate sequel, goes the distance and gets (enough) there

Rating: 7/10 (25 November 2018)

In many ways, an objectively superior sequel in the Rocky series than Rocky IV, though it's (largely if not completely) missing that film's sense of bombast mixed with some WTF bits. You know the plot of this going on, and honestly you shouldn't really be trying to get something wholly *original* by the eighth Rocky film (or, I should say, Rocky IV: Part II, or The Next Generation, etc). With one small exception on a particular story beat, I called what would happen five minutes in.
In this case, that's fine: what matters is that the filmmakers give the actors some extreme-but-believable melodrama to play, and this does that in spades, and delivers on exciting fights that tell stories unto themselves (and boy these do, in some ways the fights are superior in choreography to the first Creed, if not, obviously Coogler lacking, better shot). As much as, again, Jordan and Thompson deliver, and Stallone continues doing some of his top-tier work in his flagship creation, I found the Dragos captivating most of all.
Here are our antagonists, out for payback on the newly crowned Adonis, and I'm sure somewhere (whether it got buried in another draft or survived here and I missed it I don't know) there's a message about Russia vs USA for this decade that is timely. But I completely understood them - Dolph gets to play a human being here, unlike in IV when he was a comical-sweaty-steroid-packed killing machine - and there's a message about what it means to be the losing side and living with that that makes this not a cookie-cutter narrative.
So it is manipulative, it isn't as earth-shattering as what Coogler did, but so what? It's highly enjoyable and packs heart where it counts as a drama long before it should be considered a sports movie (and that ending... Damn it, Sly, you're not gonna get to me, uh-uh, no sir....)