Creed III film review — Rocky spin-off series makes improbable comeback to glory

By the third film in a boxing movie franchise, the champ will be old and the plot mulling retirement. Forty-one years ago in Rocky III, Sylvester Stallone’s beloved pug all but exited the sport, before a bloody encounter with the vicious Clubber Lang. In the Creed films, lately spun off from Stallone’s series, modernity has been a hallmark. But vintage blueprints still have their uses.

Early on in the new movie, title holder Adonis Creed (Michael B Jordan) also calls it quits. Hollywood wealthy, he is happy to age out. You may not be shocked that he doesn’t stay that way. You might be more surprised by how good the film is.

But first a ghost story. To open, the film flashes back to the teenage Adonis. The scene is LA circa 2002: an amateur fighter poised for greatness. Young Creed, however, is just a sidekick. The prospect is actually Damian “Dame” Anderson, another boy from hardscrabble Crenshaw, but one whose life will take a different path. Eighteen years in prison different.

Time served, the once future champion re-emerges. (He is played by the fast-rising Jonathan Majors.) The set-up settles in. As a boy, Creed was caught up in Anderson’s arrest. Now, reinvented as a manager-promoter, he feels obliged to help his old pal go after the career that might have been.

For Dame, prizefighting while pushing 40 is the easier of his tasks. The other is accepting what fate denied him but awarded his childhood friend: money, mansion, family. (Tessa Thompson again plays Creed’s musician wife Bianca; she is not given enough to do but is accomplished doing it.)

The past is everywhere in Creed III. Off-screen, recent industry drama saw Stallone publicly disavow the franchise he inspired. But Rocky III remains a muse of sorts. The character’s original rival, Apollo Creed — Adonis’s father — was a flashy proxy for Muhammad Ali. Yet by 1982, Clubber Lang, played by Mr T, made a still more loaded opponent: a snarling ex-con who spotlit the sometimes uneasy racial politics of the Rockyverse.

Four decades on, Dame can look like Lang redux, a dirty fighter with killer instincts. He also has more than the one dimension Clubber came with: a deeper character from a realer world, the crossroads presented by guns, poverty and teenage bravado.

And so we meet another ghost: The Wire, the lauded series of Baltimore crime and punishment in which Jordan broke through as a child actor. Now, his first film as director builds on the same sad ground: the particular forces that can shape young black American lives.

But how skilfully all this marbles a broad, brawny Hollywood narrative. Kudos to writers Keenan Coogler and Zach Baylin (who wrote the acclaimed tennis movie King Richard as well). The story is also credited to Coogler’s brother Ryan, writer-director of the first Creed, now mastermind of the Black Panther films. As Adonis and Anderson come apart, the raw dramatic wallop is conveyed at scale, a clever revenge story in which villain could be hero. (And vice versa.) Tilt the frame and Dame is the underdog. The Rocky.

Majors excels, his gaze heavy with malice and melancholy. On-screen Jordan is a reliable anchor, but his direction is graceful and ambitious too. In the end, every theme finds a physical mirror in the ring: the drama of life writ large in left hooks. And nobody gets to retire from that.

★★★★☆

In cinemas from March 3