Very 1980s

Rating: 4/10 (5 October 2004)

I don't believe the original ROCKY should have won the Oscar for best picture but in themselves the franchise is fairly inoffensive with my favourite one being ROCKY 2 and by far my least favourite being ROCKY 5 .
ROCKY IV is very strange because more than any other movie in the series it's the one that has dated the most , it's painfully obvious it carries all the production values of a movie made in the mid 1980s with its MTV feel . Drago gets into the ring and we get a musical montage with the godfather of soul and a bunch of dancing girls . Rocky drives a car and the movie suddenly turns into a not very good pop video where we're shown the highlights of the first three movies . You won't need me to tell you that there's a rather pro American bias to the movie too , not as bad as RAMBO ( Can you guess the connection between John Rambo and Rocky ? ) but still very cheesy in its jingoism
There is another problem that I can't quite put my finger on in that despite having a ring of truth about some aspects the movie doesn't develop them very well which gives a slightly ridiculous feel to everything . It's summed up by having one of the fighters train in a high tech gym in America while the other one does cross country running in the austere Siberian tundra . The crazy thing is that it's the American who's training in Siberia while the Soviet is using the American high tech Gym . Can you see what I'm getting at ?