Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * * *

Cast: Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Dolph Lundgren, Florian Munteanu, Phylicia Rashad, Russell Hornsby, Wood Harris, Milo Ventimiglia, Andre Ward, Brigitte Nielsen.

Stories are rarely neat, sequels are never planned that far in advance and yet somehow the Rocky/Creed franchise manages to stitch together a series of films that by rights have no business being thought of in the same bed, let alone sharing a ring together.

The power and pull of nostalgia is such that an open thread always requires another knot tied in it to avoid it slipping through your fingers, it is a knot that may be exploited with writer’s creative licence attached to it or it could possibly be the fact that boxing, as a sport, is fiercely defended by its supporters as being an entertainment and one that is gladiatorial in its scope. It is arguably unlike any other mainstream sport, it is one that the drama is intensified in the eyes of its competitors due to its up close and personal nature, the smell of blood and hate searing in the nostrils, and of the eyes are the windows to the soul, then for boxers it must be a soul enraged, hurricane like, full of devastation in mind for a short period of time.

Whereas Rocky IV should be considered of its time, a label of baffling jingoism, of unrequited patriotism and an allegory for the final days of then East-West tensions, wherein it was always obvious that Rocky was going to win out against a Soviet machine, Creed II explores with greater definition the meaning of seeking revenge, of the death and impact of fathers and what endures as family.

It is in Dolph Lundgren’s Ivan Drago that the film carries significant weight, a return, perhaps inevitably, of the antagonist of Rocky IV, and glimpsing how his life had turned since his defeat to the boxer from Philadelphia thirty plus years before hand. It is also revealing in how the film explores the theme of abuse and just how we would witness it, how he turns his own son into a weapon, fashions him with emotional rawness, how he constantly uses him as a reminder of the failings of the state which turned their back on him when he was defeated in the ring.

There can be no faulting the cinematography of the film and whilst the dialogue at times is predictable, it is in keeping with the early outings of the franchise and with the first Creed film in particular, the circling of time, a clash between ideology and nurture inevitable, Creed II is a lesson in character building and one that rises to the occasion for which it was always going to written for.

Ian D. Hall