The Rocky franchise has been around since the mid-1970s with the first movie winning the Best Picture Oscar in 1977. Since then the franchise has followed the story of Rocky Balboa as he takes on bigger and better challenges that push him to new limits. 2015 introduced Rocky's new protege Adonis Creed, who is the son of his best friend and world-famous boxer Apollo Creed. The franchise changed from focusing on Rocky to focusing on the new young up-and-comer boxer Adonis Creed. Creed 3 will be the 9th movie in the Rocky franchise and the first to be completely absent of its creator and iconic character Sylvester Stallone (Rocky). How does Creed 3 hold up without the presence of Rocky? That's the main question I found myself asking going into this movie.
Creed 3 stars Michael B. Jordan as Adonis Creed. The story picks up where the second movie left off in Adonis' career. After having accomplished everything he set out to as a boxer, Adonis decides to hang up his gloves and focus more on his family and his health. Years after retiring, we see that Adonis has become a successful boxing promoter and even has his own protege named Felix Chavez who is the current champion. Everything seems to be going great until an old friend of Adonis named Damian (Jonathan Majors) appears back into his life after getting out of prison. His old friend brings back feelings of guilt and trauma that Adonis had been suppressing for years. Now Adonis must battle with these feelings as all he has built over the last few years starts to fall apart.
As a movie in the Rocky franchise, this movie does a lot of things that follow the formula of past movies. Much like the rest of the movies, this one is all building toward that big fight at the end where the hero fights his new rival. While the formula is overused, this movie somehow finds a way to keep it all very interesting despite the repetition. What this movie gets right is how it gets you invested in the character's stories and feelings. Thanks to all the amazing performances you truly care about every character and what happens to them. A big part of what makes this story work is Jonathan Majors' portrayal of Damian. He not only looks like a threat just by his intimidating build but his character is written pretty much perfectly. The best villains are the ones who you can sympathize with to an extent and that's Damian all the way through. Even though there's sympathy, you still root against him because of how his actions affect the character you actually root for in Adonis.
Another thing this movie does really well is keeping the boxing scenes visually interesting as well as getting you emotionally invested in who wins or loses. The last fight scene in particular was so uniquely crafted it was unlike anything a boxing movie has ever done. I think it was necessary to try something new to keep the boxing scenes fresh in a franchise with nine movies and they did really good here. I find it hard to find anything to complain about here because the movie handles everything so well with the story, characters and fight scenes. The only complaint I might have is the big fight scene at the end goes against the big message of the movie in some ways, but I can't get into that without spoilers.
I was surprised by how emotional this movie was, the crowd I was watching it in the theater with seemed very invested in the movie and I could hear some groans and gasps at moments the movie was getting pretty heavy. Nine movies in and the story still felt emotional and the boxing still felt epic and exciting. Creed 3 finds ways to keep a repetitive formula fresh and shows that this decades-old franchise still has a lot left to say and show. There's even a nice tease showing where this franchise can ultimately end up in the future and it's pretty exciting.
Overall Grade: A
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