Good movie done wrongly!

Rating: 6/10 (3 February 2007)

Coming straight to the point, if Stallone was planning to make Rocky V as the final installment in the Rocky series he should have put in more effort and been more careful in handling the subtleties of the movie. Stallone did come up with a creative idea to take the Rocky series in a different direction but I guess he failed to deliver everything right. Although I must make it very clear in the beginning itself that I do not rate this movie as bad as many others have.
First of all, let me relax myself by taking out my frustration on the music. Music is one of the most important factors that characterizes the Rocky movies. Right from the first film to the fourth Rocky movies are known to give stunningly energetic music. This was totally missing in Rocky V. All music in Rocky V was rap. I mean no insult to rap music or rap musicians but the music just did not fit. It was a shocker for me when I heard the Rocky V tracks at a friend's place.
Some people have expressed their disagreement with the very idea of Rocky losing all his money, house and all and coming back to the old neighborhood. I felt that was okay but how it was eventually handled was not so effective. It always could have been done in a better way. Scripting was not so effective, I must admit. As I said, more effort was needed in handling subtleties. When you have decided that a world famous boxer was going from riches back to rags you ought to think hard about every word and every scene.
Stallone did a remarkable job by ripping the financial power of Rocky for this created room for large number of ways in which the movie could be taken forward. But where the movie scored low was Stallone not being able to capitalize on the room that was created. I felt that if this movie would have been longer I would not have a problem but my gut feeling says that there was a scope for handling things in a much better way.
Stallone creates a challenging character for himself in Rocky V. But he does not deliver the best performance in comparison to his performance in other movies. He does a decent job though with regards to the parts dealing with Rocky's strained relationship with his son. This was, to me, the best part of the movie - the whole portrayal of the father-son relationship, of course ignoring the direction glitch of the sudden aging of Rocky Jr. Sage Stallone did a decent job with his acting considering it was a debut film.
Rocky V had its other positives apart from the father-son relationship. One of them being the words of Micky Goldmill recalled by Rocky. "Get up, you son of a bitch! Cause Micky loves ya!" was amazing to me. And one thing the movie did manage to do to me was to make me hate Tommy Gunn so much that I could not help but scream out loud during the end fight, "Take him down, Rocky" A decent movie with a good story but just not executed well!