A guilty pleasure

Rating: 9/10 (28 April 2002)

Ok on the whole this film is very silly and a million miles away from the realism of the original Oscar winning original, but if you are in the mood for comic strip non-stop action, then Rocky IV is hard to beat. Credit to Sylvester Stallone in 1985 he certainly knew what his fans wanted and this film was one of the biggest money earners of the year alongwith his other film of that year Rambo First Blood Part II. As in Rocky III, Stallone kills off one of the major characters in the series as Appollo Creed is killed fighting Russian fighting machine Ivan Drago in a superbly staged fight, and this sets up a grudge match between the Soviet and our hero Rocky Balboa...in Russia! Which is the perfect set up for an utterly fantastic training sequence (in my opinion the best of the five films) as Rocky trains in the mountains, chopping logs, climbing mountains (!) as Drago trains in a state of the art space-age training gym, boosted by performance enhancing drugs. Its the good old USA v The Soviet Union, who needs a nuclear war when you can settle your diffrences in the ring. This part dates Rocky IV badly, and to be honest the sheer anti-communist feel of the film sits uneasily in the Rocky series, also one of the best things of the films was Rockys easy going, likeable personality, but after Appolos death he's more like Rambo than Rocky. The fight at the end is spectacular and they obviously had mre money to spend on this one. Also I must mention this film has a great 80's soundtrack too, and there is a great sequence that shows clips of all the previous films. I still really enjoy this film and i give it a hard hitting ***7/10***, ignore Rocky V though, it tried to recapture the feeling of the original and failed miserably.