Film Review - Creed 3 (2023)

Creed 3 is the third in the Creed series and Michael B Jordan both plays Adonis Creed and directs this movie as his debut in that chair, Adonis is now living the good life as a retired boxer managing a gym but one day he sees an old friend named Damian Anderson (Jonathan Majors) fresh out of jail after serving a lengthy prison sentence and seeing Adonis living the life of a Boxing Champion he felt was his to have makes him hunger to take it all from Adonis.

Creed 3 is a sequel I feel is as good as the first Creed film that Ryan Coogler directed and co-wrote back in 2015 and this film I feel sees the Creed spinoff series come into its own and find its own identity, the first film balanced the doing a new path with the Rocky fanservice very well while 2018’s Creed 2 was a film I didn’t really care for.

The reason why was I felt it leaned too much into the Rocky tropes with the first fight, the loss in the ring, bringing back Drago and the montage then the final fight in the ring whereas here some of those tropes are present but Jordan makes them his own and the film is better for it, some of his directing in the boxing ring fights is very good especially as a longtime Dragon Ball fan where he does some fantastic nods to some punch blows from that series, I would love to see him go full on DBZ with the fight scenes in the next film.

Also this movie has Jonathan Majors once again giving his all to a character and he matches Jordan blow for blow in both the fight scenes and the dramatic moments and is a better villain here than he is the recent Antman film as it feels like he is affable in moments but ferocious in others.

And so that was Creed 3 and I really enjoyed this movie and feel it is as good as the first Creed film and I hope future films in this series continue in this vein and build on its strengths, 3 and a half out of 5.