Rocky IV- Completely Out of Ideas

Rating: 5/10 (14 July 2017)

Leave it to Hollywood to take a good concept and run it right into the ground. Rocky IV is even more overblown than Rocky III, which, while being a fairly decent movie, was a monument to everything that was tacky about the 1980s.
You'll get the idea here pretty quick. Rocky vanquished all the domestic competition in the first three movies, so now he has to take on a Russian superfighter, a communist giant with no conscience and trained with cutting edge, high-tech 1980s Soviet boxing methods. (This movie came out during a
brief period in history when there was a popular belief that the Soviet Union possessed advanced scientific training methods that enabled them to beat the rest of the world in Olympic sports. After awhile we all figured out they were just shooting everyone up with enormous amounts of steroids).
By the fourth movie, Rocky is little more than a flawed, rough edged boxing themed superhero, and the whole thing has degenerated from Oscar caliber material to action movie status. It looks real good, I'll give it that. They spent lots of money on it. But if you watch the original Rocky and then watch this, you'll just be depressed with where they decided to go with the thing.