This isn't Mike Tyson, this is Woody Allan

Rating: 1/10 (10 May 2002)

It poses as another epic boxing movie but it boils down to a piffle. I can't believe the positive comments this piece of garbage has received. Is there no end to our lack of taste? It's a "guilty pleasure" only in the sense that having a dominatrix snap a wet towel at your bare buns in a guilty pleasure. Rocky goes through his usual homey and decidedly low-tech training routine, schlepping a huge log up a mountainside, carrying it like a yoke across his shoulders. (Oh, Lord, let us hope this wasn't intended as a religious allusion.) Dolf Lundgren, who cannot act, is a sullen Aryan monster. He's given a lousy haircut, in case we might not get the point, and even sports a black mouthpiece in the ring, in case we missed the haircut too. Stallone almost always has non-Latins in the role of the heavies. A couple of African-Americans, an Irish gang in Paradise Alley, a Nordic here, an Eskimo there. I wonder if he knows exactly what he's trying to tap into, what tribal animadversions are oozing out of his cortical sulci. He practically converts the Soviet Union to capitalism at the end. And all those years we were sending people like Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman around as Goodwill Ambassadors. Let's see. Drago -- great name! -- can land a punch that packs 2,000 pounds per square inch. That's 131.5789474 times the force of gravity at sea level. And Rocky comes away from that final bout looking put upon. And all I have to do is look in the mirror to see what gravity alone is doing to my face! Watching this -- this -- thing -- I couldn't tear myself from the screen, any more than I could pass a highway accident without gawking at it. What an execrable piece of movie-making crap.