Rocky Balboa

Directed by: Sylvester Stallone
Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Geraldine Hughes, Milo Ventimiglia, Burt Young, Antonio Tarver
Running Time: 102 Min

The 6th and final Rocky film, once again written, directed and starring Sylvester Stallone. This installment finds an aging Rocky reminiscing on the good old days and his son caught in his father's shadow. Feeling his life incomplete Rocky decides to re-enter the boxing ring and compete again after several years of inactivity. With the current undisputed champion (Antonio Tarver, Current Lightweight Champion) having no adequate competition and a computer simulation that gave Rocky the win, a match materializes.

Understandably Stallone realized that the Rocky legacy should not have ended with the humiliating Rocky V and created this as his final chapter. Really, I myself would not have lost any sleep wondering what ever happened to good ol' Rocky. With Stallone looking like a shadow of the original Rocky, (even from the Rocky V days) flashbacks to every Rocky movie (except Rocky V) and all of the "inspirational" speeches that he awkwardly delivers this movie was more of a melding of the original films. Ideally Stallone should have passed on making V and made this movie instead. With so many years in between and with so little new to say the movie is very, very uneccessary. It drags through the first half hour and he only enters the ring 3/4 of the way through the film. The fact that Stallone's own son Sage declined to reprise his role as Rocky's son should also speak volumes.

The whole premise is based/stolen from events that actually happened in sports history. First the computer simulation in the movie echos back to a similar Mohammed Ali/ Rocky Marciano sim (in 1969) which proclaimed Rocky the winner and left Ali to proclaim the computer was from Alabama. Second are the comebacks of several heavyweights after their primes including George Foreman and Evander Holyfield. Ironically it seems like Stallone is also past his prime and is looking back on the glory days where he could pull off the boxing sequences with some believablility. Even the training montage was painful to watch, the slow motion was slower than slow my DVD turned into VHS.

For fans of the series there is a lot of hope in this film but you may be better off watching the original movie as a closing on the career of this legendary made up boxer. The greatest underdog of our time came back for one last round but should have thrown in the towel years ago.

Grade: C-