Creed review

Ryan Coogler’s unlikely “Rocky” spin-off “Creed” is an uncompromisingly traditional sports drama that works as a piece of pop-entertainment because of its commitment to emotional storytelling. Much like the director’s approach to his debut indie about police violence “Fruitvale Station,” Coogler spends a lot of time getting inside the heads of his characters and building a tangible, and believable world for them to inhabit. The big sports movie moments are present and the familiar beats of the genre are eventually paid off, but Coogler informs these moments with care and precision when it comes to the plight of the characters and the strength of the film’s performances.

This story picks up decades after the death of Rocky mentor and adversary Apollo Creed. Outside of the margins of the sequel’s cannon, it is learned that Creed had an illegitimate son named Adonis Johnson (Michael B. Jordan) with a women outside of his marriage. When the young boy’s mother dies and he is left orphaned Creed’s true wife Mary Ann (Phylicia Rashad) finds him in a juvenile detention center for boys and decides to bring him to her home in Los Angeles and raise the child like her own. After he’s grown, though she would like him to focus on his career as a business man, Johnson has a yearning to be a great fighter like the father he never met, secretly training in Mexico and building his natural talent as a boxer.  Soon enough, Adonis decides to quit his suit and tie job and move to Philadelphia to train with the aged and broken Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone).

Cinematically “Creed” distinguishes itself from the other “Rocky” movies with a quiet and grounded sensibility. There’s a loose, handheld style used throughout and a much more somber tone than is usually expressed in the rest of the movies of this franchise. Coogler directs the film as if the other movies were a mythologized version of a real-life figure that we’re meeting for the first time in this iteration. Of course this isn’t the case, but the grit of this movie world is an effective tone-setter and Coogler informs the mentor-mentee clichés of the plot with a documentary style realism that helps the film’s urban setting feel properly lived-in.

The camera work also allows for longer lasting cuts that boarder on virtuoso filmmaking without ever announcing a flashy movie-moment or any post-Scorsese directorial muscle-flexing. Instead, much like the performances, these longer cuts are used to open the scenes up and allows the visual language to breath, especially during the climactic fight sequences.

Michael B. Jordan is terrific here as the young Adonis Johnson. I won’t say that he’s written with a ton of depth or complexity, but Jordan’s interiority and natural screen presence fills in the blanks left of the page. When young Creed moves to Philadelphia he meets a neighbor played by Tessa Thompson, a musician with progressive hearing-loss. This relationship never feels like a superfluous B-plot, mostly because of the real chemistry that exists between the performers and because the attention payed toward the film’s themes of living in the moment before opportunity eventually fades. Stallone is also allowed to play his iconic character with more vulnerability than we have seen from him in some time.

“Creed” is a movie that we’ve seen before. The tropes of the boxing-genre are inescapable and just about every one of those boxes are checked in this somewhat pedestrian screenplay. But cinema should also exist off the page, and that is where Coogler finds his strength as a storyteller, often better at expressing how a scene should feel rather than what it tells.  

Grade - B+

Originally published in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2015

Listen to more discussion about "Creed" and "Room" on this week's Jabber and the Drone podcast.