Back to his roots, and back on form.

Rating: 8/10 (1 June 2007)

In this fifth installment of the Rocky franchise our hero is out of luck. Brain damaged from the epic encounter with Drago in Rocky Four, he is unable to fight and in danger of going bankrupt, he moves back to his old neighborhood and begins training up and coming fighter tommy "the machine" gunn. For those of you who have heard the general conscientious that Rocky V is not worth watching I strongly advise you to give it a go, the criticism of this film is something that has never really made sense to me. It moves away from the traditional format, (which by the fourth installment had become a series of consecutive montages with badly dated music) and sees Rocky go truly back to his roots even wearing the hat again, add that to a return for Burgess Meredith in some bitter sweet flashback scenes along with a simple but decent storyline and you get a vastly underrated film. Rocky is persuaded by a young contender Tommy Gunn to step back into the world of boxing as a manager and coach. The pair of them get carried away with Tommy's success, Rocky begins to neglect his son and Gunn becomes lured by the riches promised to him by Richard Gant's George Washington Duke, an obvious ringer for Don King. Rocky V takes the franchise full circle and makes note of the obvious changes that have taken place in the world of boxing, and come to think of it, most sports around the globe. It brings a clash of the two types of sportsmen, the old fashioned and the new. The difference in Rocky 5 being that the new uses his skills seeking fame and fortune and forgets what truly matters, a mistake Rocky himself makes in the third film. The main difference however is that Tommy lacks one special ingredient that Balboa has, something that made Rocky endearing to us all in the first place, Rocky has got heart and so has this film. It's also worth pointing out that it hasn't dated nearly as badly as the third and fourth installments and aside from some dodgy late eighties-early nineties rap music it doesn't have much else that ages it. At the premier of the recent Rocky Balboa film I saw an interview with Sylvester Stallone he referred to Rocky V as a "bad film" and he also noted that when he bought the anthology he "threw the fifth one out." Now i'm not going to kid myself and think that the great man is going to ever read this review but ill take the tiny chance that he might one day glance at it to say:- Sly, give this one another go its not bad, not bad at all. Rocky V is certainly not deserving of being chucked out of the anthology, in fact it deserves its place in there, it deserves to share a box with the rest, more so that Rocky Four anyway. While this film may not have the emotional punch of Rocky Balboa it certainly isn't worth disregarding. If your one of the many that skipped this one, go on, give it a go, you might be pleasantly surprised.