Drago II
Adonis is on the rise after revealing to the world that he is the illegitimate son of former heavyweight champion, Apollo Creed. After becoming the champion himself, a familiar face emerges to challenge him. Will he hold onto the title? Let’s find out in our review of Creed II.
***Warning: Spoilers***
Creed was a huge reboot for the franchise and filling its shoes would prove to be a tough task. When we catch up to Adonis, it seems like we jumped a whole career’s worth of boxing to the Heavyweight championship. Although watching a whole movie following 20+ wins, it would have been nice to see the progression. Fast forwarding a fractured rib and a pregnancy adds to the mix. But before we even get to those last two things, we have a few other problems to handle.
From the start, this doesn’t feel like a movie about the character it’s named after. We open to the dreary routine of the Drago family. It turns out that after Ivan’s loss to Rocky years ago wasn’t just for the title, but for the respect of his country and wife as well. It may have been a good, but crazy, choice to make the movie all about drago. But as we go along, we keep getting new storylines introduced. Babies, marriage, trainers, Russia, random desert gym, Rocky, and everyone’s father problems; there is too much going on here. With all of this, some stories are better than others, making them look like an afterthought.
While going through each of these stories, Adonis seems to whine the whole time. This version of the character feels quite different from the first movie. Although he was raised as a spoiled brat, Adonis seemed a bit more humble in the previous film. He also seemed to not care much about his big time father, who was never there for him. Now, it looks like he’s taking a lose-everything bout to avenge the man he barely knew or cared about, making people uncomfortable with his whining along the way.
Great boxing scenes are back, but aren’t the highlight of the film. This sequel had a change in the director’s chair, so no innovative one-takes here. The boxing choreography looked realistic and was riveting, causing some of my audience to cheer as if it were a real match. I’m not even sure if a match like this is possible, because they are clearly different weight classes. The story and drama are the focus of this, but like I said before, it feels like there is too much to focus on.
The follow up to Creed is a comparable one, but it is bogged down by some clunky story telling. Being a boxing movie, it has great fight scenes, but the story brings it down. It almost changes what we loved about Adonis in the first movie. It is still worth watching, because it also feels like this story still has room for more entries.