Skip It! It Doesn't Even Feel Like A Rocky Movie!

Rating: Null/10 (24 September 2015)

The fifth instalment in the Rocky series, Rocky V finds Rocky Balboa in retirement & poverty after he suffers a serious brain injury from his previous fight and is reluctantly made to leave boxing. Also learning that his entire wealth is lost on the stock market, Rocky returns to his Pennsylvania neighbourhood with his family and after meeting a promising boxer, takes him under his wing. Things are set in motion when his protégé betrays him.
Written by Sylvester Stallone & directed by John G. Avildsen, the film reunites the team that was responsible for Rocky and now, they're also responsible for coming up with the worst chapter in the series for Rocky V is an uninspired, tedious & dull movie from start to finish and for what was supposed to be the final chapter of the franchise, it doesn't get any worse than this. With no build up, no story, no proper resolution, the film lacks everything.
Avildsen's direction isn't good at all, Stallone's writing is another culprit. The story takes the life of Balboa family back to square one, with father-son tension added to the storyline that could've been interesting on some level but after a while, you just don't care. Early into the movie, it's evident that this film lacks the heart & soul of its predecessors and diverges a lot from the usual formula that had kept the fans around despite the poor sequels.
Despite more budget, Rocky V fails to make proper use of it for the set pieces are similar to how they were in the first film, there is nothing to mention about its camera-work, Editing is disappointing for the entire 104 minutes of its runtime fails to offer anything interesting and for the most part, it's just plain boring cinema. Performances aren't worthy of mention at all for Stallone hams like crazy, so does the rest of the cast, the relationship between Balboa & his son is ineffectively handled, and the ending is just lame.
On an overall scale, Rocky V is without a doubt the weakest instalment in the franchise and a sequel that shouldn't have been made in the first place. Stallone has gone on to discard it in the later years but his screenplay for that movie was just as bad. Although it's a shame that what was supposed to be the series finale didn't end the saga on a high note, it's also a relief considering that it made Stallone go back to the roots of the first picture and take ample time to draw out a fitting conclusion, which arrived 16 years later in the form of the much superior Rocky Balboa. Skip this one!