Film Review - Creed (2015)

Creed is the newest Rocky spinoff which focuses on Adonis (Michael B Jordan) who is the son of fighter Apollo Creed and like his dad has a desire to fight in the ring and prove himself but to do that he will need the help of Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone) to be ready for the ring.

Creed is a well made film but I would also say it ranks in the bottom half of my listings in the Rocky series (2, 4 and Balboa would be my favorites) but in no way does that make it a bad movie not at all as director Ryan Coogler does a really nice job with this movie in terms of bringing his own voice to the proceedings as well as capturing the beats and flavour of what you expect from a Rocky film, I particularly liked one scene he did of the characters walking up some stairs as it felt very real to me.

But what really anchors this movie are the 2 strong performances at its centre, Jordan is simply great here as not only do you believe he could be Carl Weathers's son but the tone and demeanour of his performance also made me think "Yeah I would feel this way if I made Fantastic 4" and much like Stallone in the Rocky movies you buy into his character's drive and determination to make it as a fighter, Stallone meanwhile is also great I would really love to see him Oscar nominated as you feel with his performance the weight of his life bearing down on him but like the driven fighter of his young years he still can't quite bring himself to give up just yet.

Unfortunately the film has 2 weaknesses going for it the first is the villain Ricky Conlan he's quite frankly not that interesting he just comes across as a British ripoff of Clubber Lang from Rocky 3 and I didn't like him that much plus the film runs a little bit too long its a bit over 2 hours and it could've lost I think 10-15 minutes off its running time.

And so that was Creed it has some faults but the 2 central performances anchor it effortlessly, 3 out of 5.