In Brief: ROCKY BALBOA

ROCKY BALBOA (Sylvester Stallone, USA, 2006, D+)

Some movies are so bad, they're good; Stallone made a career out of such movies in ROCKY II - IV (most Rocky fans I've talked to swear that ROCKY V never happened). This is not one of those movies. I have never seen a director work with as much desperation as Stallone, shamelessly cribbing the past episodes of the franchise for something, anything that will hold the viewer's interest. It is a nostalgia power play from beginning to end, and almost none of it works: the plot writes itself in about 2 minutes (although I did expect that), the "inspirational" monologues Rocky gives the boxing commission and his son are downright cringe-inducing, the other characters are none-too-clever retreads from the older films, and the score--which is basically just "Gonna Fly Now" rearranged, with a few especially odd tracks thrown in to complete the befuddlement--is the worst I've heard in a long time. Even the bad guy, a normally strong point of previous ROCKY movies (Apollo Creed, Clubber Lang, Ivan Drago) is uninspired and pathetic--Mason "The Line" Dixon (I couldn't make up stuff this bad if I tried) doesn't even look remotely like an undisputed heavyweight champion of the world. The "plus" is for the fight scene, which replicates an HBO broadcast and is kind of cute, but by the time Stallone got into those bizarre montage sequences involving his dead wife anytime Rocky took a big hit from Dixon, my sympathy was killed off (Adrian, by the way, would never have approved of this fight--"YOU CAAAAN'T WIN!"). If Stallone was trolling for sympathy with this movie, he seems to have succeeded; I can't explain the critical success the movie has received so far other than by people's fond memories of the previous movies and Stallone's palpable need for a pat on the back.