Film Review: "Rocky Balboa"

Return of That Fighter With a Soft Heart Inside a Hard Body

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
The New York Times
Published: December 20, 2006

Aw, ya can’t help but love da big Palooka! Under all dem muscles the champ’s still got a heart o’ gold.

Who else could that be but Rocky Balboa? Sylvester Stallone’s endearing alter ego with the droopy eyes and dungeon-master croak has slouched back onto the screen, bowed but unbroken, to fight the good fight one more time. Since he was last seen 16 years ago in “Rocky V,” this two-time former heavyweight champion, now pushing 60 (Mr. Stallone’s age), has evolved a philosophy of the ring that befits an older, slower athlete.

The measure of a prizefighter is not how much punishment you can give but how much you can take, he declares more than once. In other words, heroism equals masochism; no gain without pain. Mel Gibson would understand.

Mr. Stallone’s body is a sight. A weightlifter’s slab of aged meat, knotted with tiny hard veins popping out of the shoulders, it is just this side of muscle-bound and somewhat grotesque. It is something you might see hung in the window of a steak house and wonder what kind of carnivore would order such a leathery, sinewy carcass.

When I first learned of this film, presumably the final episode in the “Rocky” franchise, the idea of the 60-year-old Rocky going at it one last time sounded risible. Reports of audiences snickering derisively at trailers for the movie seemed to confirm my expectations.

Surprisingly “Rocky Balboa,” is no embarrassment. Like its forerunners it goes the distance almost in spite of itself. It’s all heart and no credibility except as a raw-boned fable. From the very beginning Rocky Balboa was about as lifelike a character as Popeye pumped up with spinach. But that may be the point of a series that peddles the notion that if you dream it hard enough, you can live it.

For what T. S. Eliot wrote about humans being unable to bear “too much reality” is doubly true for moviegoers. Most of us go to the movies to sit in the dark and dream the impossible dream, whether it’s fighting a heavyweight bout or playing love scenes with Brad and Angelina.
Like “Rocky,” the Bicentennial fantasy that inaugurated the series, “Rocky Balboa” is a skeletal movie, a live-action cartoon that operates on cartoon logic. Don’t ask why this former heavyweight champion still lives in squalor in South Philadelphia while owning a popular restaurant named after his sainted wife, Adrian (now five years gone from cancer)? Don’t ask why his whiny son, Robert (Milo Ventimigilia), a charmless yuppie manqué with a chip on his shoulder, does not bear the slightest resemblance to his father.

Be happy to relive the good old times and to appreciate the touchstones that are dutifully trotted out. Here comes Rocky’s combative brother-in-law Paulie (Burt Young), a character seen in every Rocky movie and looking much the worse for wear, to loiter disconsolately at the restaurant for no particular reason. And here comes Bill Conti’s familiar blaring theme music when the action finally picks up.

Now more than ever Rocky Balboa seems a throwback to the era of the chaste noble athlete who is too pure for sex. He’d rather pray at the shrine of his dead wife than think of finding a new one. When the possibility of romance presents itself in the person of Marie (Geraldine Hughes), a barmaid and single mother, who in the original “Rocky” was a teenager who hurled abuse at him, he is oblivious. But she too is a throwback. Wide-eyed and pug-faced, tough but understanding, she is a true-blue sidekick for a Dead End Kid, and Rocky, in his infinite generosity, invites her to work in his restaurant.

“Rocky Balboa” drags its feet for a dangerously long time before the main course sashays onto the screen. When a computer-simulated match between Rocky (in his fighting prime) and the current heavyweight champion Mason (The Line) Dixon (the light heavyweight Antonio Tarver), determines that Rocky would win, people get excited. Dixon, though undefeated, has earned so little respect after a series of easy victories that his management decides that an exhibition match in which Dixon holds back his full power would be good for his career.

A grunting and heaving training montage follows, and finally the bout, a 10-round cliffhanger in Las Vegas with every bell and whistle activated, in which neither fighter holds back. And that’s it. Gonna fly now.

“Rocky Balboa” is rated PG (Parental Guidance suggested). It has violence, but it’s confined to the ring.

ROCKY BALBOA
Opens today nationwide.

Written and directed by Sylvester Stallone; director of photography, Clark Mathis; edited by Sean Albertson; music by Bill Conti; production designer, Franco-Giacomo Carbone; produced by Charles Winkler, William Chartoff and David Winkler; released by MGM Pictures.
Running time: 102 minutes.

WITH: Sylvester Stallone (Rocky Balboa), Burt Young (Paulie), Geraldine Hughes (Marie), Milo Ventimiglia (Robert Balboa Jr.), Antonio Tarver (Mason “The Line” Dixon), James Francis Kelly III (Steps) and Tony Burton (Duke).