Rocky Goes Hollywood...And Loses Himself

Rating: 6/10 (11 March 2017)

After conquering Apollo Creed and winning the title in the previous film, in this installment Rocky Balboa must face his toughest opponent yet...himself.
For a basic plot summary, "Rocky III" continues the inspiring story of pugilist Balboa (Sylvester Stallone). After defending his title numerous times against hand-picked opponents, Rocky seems to have lost that "eye of the tiger" he had in the two Creed fights. At the same time, #1 contender Clubber Lang (Mr. T) is hungry for a shot at the strap (training vigorously while Rocky films commercials). This causes dissension in the Balboa ranks, with trainer Mickey (Burgess Meredith) and wife Adrian (Talia Shire) trying to protect Rocky for different reasons.
The redeeming portion of this screenplay is the continued character growth of Rocky. For whatever reason (as Sly Stallone had proved himself completely incompetent as a director up to that point), Sly just "gets" Rocky and knows how to smartly advance the character.
The problem is that whereas the first two Rocky films use the fight scenes to cap off the drama, this time the drama is few and far between due to the bloated ring time. Nearly half the movie is spent "in the ring", and considering the fakey fight scenes, that is not a good thing. Likely because Rocky II was roundly criticized for being too slow to develop, this time the action is fast and furious, though not to the benefit of the overall experience.
Another thing that hurts this series is the terrible casting decisions that is Mr. T. He turns in easily the worst performance of the entire six-film series, and this includes a movie starring Dolph Lundgren. He has no sense of choreography in the boxing scenes, and only issues a series of grunts in the acting department.
Thus, while "Rocky III" does enough things right to be watchable, it also does enough tings wrong for me to consider it the worst of the entire franchise.