- This movie is basically the exact same movie as the original Rocky, just aged thirty years. This would normally be a recipe for disaster, but it isn’t. Neither film is exactly a masterpiece of cinematic brilliance, but you love them anyway because they’re underdog stories that don’t have that same level of cheese or schmaltz as other feel-good sports movies. They’re actually really honest movies, just like Rocky himself. Sure, you get everything at face value, but what you get is pretty raw and pretty satisfying because you don’t get that type of honesty in other movies.
- Adrian is dead in this movie.
- But Rocky’s love lives on!!!
- No, seriously, he’s all in love with her and he is so tragically sad about her death and starts crying in the meat locker while talking about it with Paulie. Which sounds really fucking ridiculous now that I write that, but actually made me sniffle. It was an honest emotional reaction. HONEST. Honesty is the key here. At the very end when he’s visiting her grave after the big fight, he gets to say “Yo, Adrian” and it’s awesome.
- Paulie’s paintings are HYSTERICALLY BAD. They don’t exactly explain why he’s spending time at work painting really bizarre images of cows, but maybe that’s why they ended up firing him. [Maybe they explained his love for painting in one of the four movies in between this one and the first one, I don't know.]
- They brought back little Marie, which was awesome and a nice throwback to the first movie. The part where Rocky met her son was hysterical. She explains to Rocky that her son’s father is Jamaican and Rocky says “Oh, a European.” DIES.
- What I really like about this movie (and the first) is that the humour is really, really natural. It’s not stuff that’s purposely written to be funny; it probably doesn’t even sound very funny on the page. It’s the kind of stuff that average people say that gives you a chuckle.
- Sylvester Stallone can still do one-handed push-ups. It was sort of astounding. o_O
- The end credits are amusing because they have clips of random people running up the steps and acting victorious just like Rocky himself.
- During his training, Rocky goes running with the dog he adopted from the pound (OMG SWEETIE) and the dog actually gets a grey sweatshirt to match Rocky’s, which should be irritating in a Paris Hilton sort of way but instead is just incredibly awesome. Actually, I think if you play the Rocky Theme over any piece of film, whatever is in the frame automatically becomes exponentially more awesome.
- Mason “The Line” Dixon is a great name for an opponent.
- This movie is like Snakes on a Plane: it should be mediocre to average since it’s a movie that pretty much operates at face value and has absolutely no surprises in it whatsoever, and yet it is one of the most satisfying movies I’ve seen this year because despite doing exactly what it says it will, it does it so fantastically. Seriously, ten points to Stallone.
Rocky Balboa
If you’ve seen the first Rocky movie, you’ve seen this one already.
IMDB Plot Synopsis Rocky Balboa comes out of retirement to step into the ring for the last time and face the heavyweight champ Mason 'The Line' Dixon.