Creed III (2023)

The master of the boxing ring faces down a demon from his past

Creed III (2023)

Michael B. Jordan is the retired Adonis Creed compelled to climb back into the ring

Creed III, the ninth installment of the Rocky saga, had me wincing at its propulsive, icily choreographed brutality.

Yet I thoroughly enjoyed diving into the characters’ personal trials and appreciated the boxers’ grueling training and rapid, meticulously studied jabs.

Was I sucker punched?

I didn’t have a lot of experience with boxing movies.  In 1976, responding to the hype when Rocky came out, I made myself go see it.

Sylvester Stallone as the Italian Stallion won me over with his working-class grit.  The bewildered Rocky didn’t just end up boxing shrewdly.  He overcame believing he was a loser by punching up his self-respect.

I skipped Rocky II-VI, and only recently watched Creed (2015) and Creed II (2018) as a warmup to see how many rounds I could go with this latest installment.  I’m glad I got myself in shape.

Those first two Creed installments saw Rocky Balboa return to train the son of the man he defeated, Apollo Creed.

Apollo’s son Adonis (Michael B. Jordan) learned in both movies that he didn’t need to revive the legacy of his lost father (who died before Adonis was born) but transcend it.  Be his own man.  Become a good husband and father.

All this was uplifting enough if you, as I did, dodged the body blows.  The tightly staged bouts were performed and shot with bone-crunching conviction.

Adonis’ victories after arduous training and the clobbering he took in the ring made his wins feel fully earned.

Yet what pulled me through both those earlier movies wasn’t the frisky pugilism.

It was Stallone’s becalmed, understated acting as a grizzled, reconstituted Rocky, a happy restaurateur who no longer needed boxing in his life.

Stallone’s graceful immersion into this burnished, plainspoken survivor was quiet and exultant.

His aged Rocky turned shuffling, shrugging and mumbling into a study in durability.  Balboa the old-timer had grown philosophical about what kinds of “winning” a boxer actually deals with.

As a trainer, Balboa pushed Adonis to the limits.  As a father figure he cautioned him to remember what he was fighting for, explicitly, to become the decent man he needed to be.

With Creed III this rather sweet moral cajoling has vanished.  The benevolent Rocky isn’t even in the movie, and Stallone, though he’s listed as a producer, has said he declined to participate because of the script’s dark fixations.

Jonathan Majors brims with controlled menace as the fierce Damian Anderson

Indeed, they abound.  Adonis, called Donnie, has retired as a champion and opened a chain of gyms where he trains “the next generation” of fighters and even-handedly promotes bouts between them.

Back into his life drifts a boyhood friend, Damian Anderson (Jonathan Majors), after serving a long prison sentence.

Once a rising Golden Gloves star, Damian entreats Donnie to give him a chance at a comeback.  Training at a gallop, he proves a beast with gloves, decking opponents with startling prowess – and undisguised nastiness.

He delights not just in defeating opponents but gleefully dissing them.  Hit below the belt?  Bloody your opponent’s face?  Why not?

When a sudden vacancy gives Damian a shot at taking on the World Champion, he dispatches the holder of the belt with gleeful viciousness.

Baring his teeth, now wearing the Crown, he mocks Donnie as a has-been not nearly as worthy a champion as Damian might have been, and now is.

Donnie can’t stand that disparagement, and believes he must take Damian down, because his former friend wears the Crown meanly, dishonoring it.

Donnie also understands, as we’ll discover, that Damian isn’t just winning, he’s avenging.

From the moment Majors slithers on screen, subtly easing Damian back into Donnie’s life, it was the actor who kept me on edge.

I waited for him not just to say his next line but to spring at someone’s throat.  He turned Damian’s coercing into a live thing on screen.

Majors is now on my personal “new Brando” list.

We all have our personal list of actors who carry that indefinable “edge” that calls to mind no one so much as Brando.

They’re actors who, like Brando, with a glance, a pivot, a shocking line reading, spring surprises we don’t see coming, jolt us into re-imagining what daring screen acting can look like, reach for.

Jonathan Majors is now on my personal “new Brando” list.  Damian is written as transgressive, so we’re not surprised that he’s wild in the ring, even, as Donnie’s training gym colleagues warn, “dangerous”.

But from the moment Majors slithers on screen, subtly easing Damian back into Donnie’s life, it was the actor who kept me on edge.

As Majors carries his body in a menacing forward lean or flashes an infernal “smile” that’s actually contemptuous, I couldn’t sense any limits constraining the actor.

I waited for him not just to say his next line but to spring at someone’s throat.  He turned Damian’s coercing into a live thing on screen.

And Majors’ volatility and disquiet weren’t just angles on the character; they felt like sharply honed tools in the actor’s kit.

Majors performs with a kind of abandon that I predict smart directors in the future are going to let rip.

Here and in two other recent movies of his I’ve seen, Devotion (2022) and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania (2023), he can speak his lines with a street snarl or a watchful, measured gravity.

Signaling that the actor is totally into not just the role but the impression he’s making. It’s him and the audience, toe to toe.

Fascinatingly, Creed III is directed by Jordan, making his debut behind the camera.  Clearly director and star formed a pact giving Majors’ bravado the run of every scene he’s in.

(I’m all anticipation after reports from the recent Sundance Festival that Majors gives perhaps his most incendiary performance in the upcoming Magazine Dreams, due out this year.)

Thompson’s Bianca and Jordan’s Creed discover they’re a mature loving couple

Yet another surprise is how Jordan’s acting under his own direction is looser and more fluent than in the two earlier Creed movies.

He nails, for instance, a delightful scene where he laughingly teaches his daughter, using signing – she was born deaf – to “box”.

Jordan as director also gets more complex performances from Tessa Thompson as Adonis’ wife Bianca and Phylicia Rashad as Mary-Anne, his mother.

In both of the earlier Creed movies the actresses did solid work supporting a boxer whose resolve sometimes faltered.

But this time both women take on richer dimensions.  Bianca proves to be a true mental and moral sparring partner to Donnie, and makes their marriage seem not entirely happy but more durable for being honest.

Rashad’s dignified Mary-Anne deftly reminds her son that their time together is running out.

Jordan and Majors have both said they want to go more rounds with Donnie and Damian, and Jordan has told interviewers that Creed IV is already in the works.

I want a ringside seat.