Balboa faces the Evil Empire

Rating: Null/10 (29 April 2002)

Viewed more than a decade after the Cold War ended, Rocky IV comes across as an oddly masochistic and unprescient American vision of the imminent endgame. For it's the Red Army's Drago who is scientifically selected for his genes and trained to perfection, with one sly syringe shot suggesting an assist from illicit substances. Poor old America can only field an unconfident, mumbling, stumbling fellow who hides out in a log cabin with his klutz of a brother and trains by chopping wood or hopping across half-frozen streams. The message for 90% of the movie is: Russia's the future, Reagan's America is the primitive past.
And then- guess what happens in the ring, under the very noses of the Politburo led by a Gorbachev lookalike? Before the unsurprising finale, the 20 or so minutes of plot in this 90 minute film give us plenty of time to contemplate its deficiencies: there is no Burgess Meredith keeping Mr Balboa up to scratch, the wives are superfluous (Nielsen snarls and sneers but contributes nothing to the story) and the Soviets are depicted not so much as enjoyably bad guys as sullen, arrogant nullities. Instead of a tale with twists and turns, we are served endless montages to bombastic music, including a reprise of Rocky's golden moments with and without Apollo Creed from previous instalments.
At least the non-championship grudge match goes close to the distance, rather than aborting in round two like most heavyweight bouts in the real world of Don King and alphabet-soup boxing organisations. Remarkable, since Drago is credited with a punch that packs 2,150 psi: enough to drive Rocky's teeth backward through his neck the first time the Russian robot connected. Still, if two white guys can be rated top in the world, one should not expect verisimilitude in the way they fight either.