< Home / Interviews / Critic / Bio / My articles in Japanese >

Rocky Balboa

Written by Nobuhiro Hosoki

 

"Rocky Balboa" is the latest installment of this influential and iconic film saga about an Italian stallion in the boxing ring--one that packs a decisive blow at the end. This story of an eternal underdog started 30 years ago in the south of Philadelphia. In this new release, an aging Rocky is returning to his roots, residing in a modest house. After losing his beloved Adrian to cancer, he is engaged in a daily routine of tending her grave and running a white-tablecloth Italian eatery--in general, leading a rather gloomy life.

On his anniversary, he reminisces about and revisits the place where he courted Adrian. This is all too much his old meatpacker buddy Paulie (Burt Young), can bear, and he tells Rocky to snap out of it. The fighter's mundane life is about to change when opportunity knocks in the form of an ESPN computer-simulation game that pits Rocky against Mason Dixon (Antonio Tarver: former light heavyweight champ), the currently reigning champion. Dixon has also been struggling to gain respect, losing his confidence.  As a result, Rocky wins the simulated game.  This incident unleashes Rocky's unrelenting desire for a challenge--he calls it "Stuff in a Basement." Mason's promoter hatches the idea of an ultimate publicity stunt by matching up two of the champs from different eras. Even though Rocky is beyond his prime, he simply wants this last hurrah.

All this despite the disapproval of his son Robert Jr. (Milo Ventimiglia), a weaseley little yuppie who has long lived in his father's formidable shadow and inescapable limelight.  When Rocky makes a passionate plea to Philly's athletic commission for his boxing license, he whips himself back into shape in the old familiar style, drinking raw eggs and scarfing away slabs of beef, and scaling the stairs of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. But Rocky no longer has any speed, so he has to use the tactics of blunt force trauma.  In the process, Rocky has a liaison with little Marie (Geraldine Hughes), a girl from the neighborhood  whom he once rescued from delinquency. Now she's an insecure single mother.  There'd been a possibility of romance, but they'd remained platonic friends.

The big Las Vegas showdown is extraordinarily choreographed, with edited fighting sequences that are genuinely tensed up and testosterone- and adrenaline-driven. You have the sense that you're watching a pay-per-view of the raw fight itself, thanks to an actual HBO crowd that's edited into the mix. Screenwriter Stallone sets up the fighting that doesn't encroach any story line till the final 20 minutes. For the most part he succeeds in bringing back a sensibility of the original that we have gotten to know over the decades of his vulnerability. That is a portrayal of a flawed human that everybody can relate to, with the message of "give everything you have and face what you fear the most." 

In the end, Stallone brings the saga to this fitting conclusion, leaving us the feeling of having seen a perpetual hero. His wisdom is this: "It doesn't matter how this looks to other people; all that matters is how it looks to you."  To that I simply chant, "Rocky, Rocky, Rocky!!"

Written and directed by Sylvester Stallone
Director of photography: Clark Mathis
Edited by Sean Albertson music by Bill Conti
Production designer: Franco-Giacomo Carbone
Produced by Charles Winkler, William Chartoff and David Winkler
Released by MGM Pictures.
Running time: 102 minutes.

Cast: Sylvester Stallone (Rocky Balboa)
Burt Young (Paulie)
Geraldine Hughes (Marie)
Milo Ventimiglia (Robert Balboa Jr.)
Antonio Tarver (Mason “The Line” Dixon)
James Francis Kelly III (Steps),
and Tony Burton (Duke).