This film could almost as fairly been titled “Rocky VIII” since once again it stars Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa and Stallone both co-wrote and co-produced. What’s more the central plot device is a essentially a re-run of “Rocky IV” as the son of Apollo Creed – Michael B Jordan as Adonis – accepts the challenge of the son of Ivan Drago – Florian Munteanu as Viktor – as the first seeks to avenge the death of his father and the second attempts to restore the honour of his father.<\/p>\n
Of course, Rocky is no longer a fighter but a trainer, the Russian characters are very one-dimensional, and the final outcome is never in doubt, but young, black director Steven Caple Jr. does a decent job taking over from Ryan Coogler, another young and black director who did so well with “Creed”. We have all the familiar “Rocky” tropes, including fearsome training techniques, and this time multiple father-son relationships in a very satisfying sequel in which the actual boxing matches are genuinely visceral.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This film could almost as fairly been titled “Rocky VIII” since once again it stars Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa and Stallone both co-wrote and co-produced. What’s more the central plot device is a essentially a re-run of “Rocky IV” as the son of Apollo Creed – Michael B Jordan as Adonis – accepts the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23894"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23896,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23894\/revisions\/23896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}