BEFORE: By now, it's a formula - start with a 5-minute recap of the previous film's bout, fart around for an hour or so, then cut to the training montage and climactic fight. After losing and regaining some jungle cat's optical appendage...
THE PLOT: When Rocky is defeated by a brutal challenger, Apollo Creed offers to retrain him in order to regain his fighting spirit.
AFTER: Some quick thoughts before I hit the road on a tour of Delaware's outlet malls and brewpubs...
Rocky faces off against Hulk Hogan as "Thunderlips", a character I perceive to be a dig at Randy "Macho Man" Savage and/or Jesse "The Body" Ventura. It's interesting, not only because you never see a boxer fight a wrestler, but because in the final match against Clubber Lang, Rocky seems to borrow Hulk's wrestling script - namely to get hit in the face so many times that "Hulk-amania" starts running wild. When Hulk would get that look in his face, you just knew that he was going to come back and win - the other guy had lost at that point, it was a done deal...
During the training montage, they cut from Apollo running at top speed to Rocky running in slow-motion. Then back to Apollo at top speed - it hardly seemed fair to make Rocky run in slow-mo! I half expected him to complain about that...
Apollo seemed in pretty good shape while he was training Rocky - and why, exactly, couldn't Apollo fight Clubber Lang? And what kind of a name is "Clubber", anyway - some sort of family name?
This was the film that made a household name out of Mr. T - and may be the first film in which a fool was, in fact, pitied. I think people might tend to forget that...
This film had much more action than "Rocky 2" - does that make it a better film? Hmmm...
I'm out for three days - I'll continue with "Rocky 4" on Monday...something patriotic for Memorial Day...
RATING: 5 out of 10 "Exlax" watches
No comments:
Post a Comment