Rock Bottom (Rocky V (DVD))

Member Name: SWSt

Product:	Rocky V (DVD)
Date:	02/02/07 (226 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Thinly veiled "Don King" character is quite fun

Disadvantages: Rubbish, acting, plot, music. An emotionless void. Need I go on?

What’s it about?
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After suffering financial collapse, Rocky finds himself back where he started – in the slums of Philadelphia. He takes under his wing a new protégé – Tommy Gunn – and is dismayed when he betrays him.

Who’s in it?
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From the acting, the simple answer to that question is “a lot of people who wish they weren’t”. Sylvester Stallone returns as Rocky, but really, he is just going through the motions here, turning up and mumbling his lines in an embarrassed fashion. Similarly, Talia Shire (in a much reduced role) is left with little to do other than hang around in the background looking concerned. Real life boxer Tommy Morrison turns up, and is as wooden as you would expect, even somehow managing to look unconvincing in the fight scenes. It comes to something when the adult cast is upstaged in the acting stakes by young Sage Stallone, playing Rocky’s son, Robert Jnr.

The only person who appears to be having any fun at all is Richard Gant as boxing promoter George Washington Duke. It’s a thinly veiled impersonation of Don King and is wonderfully over-the-top in its pantomime style delivery. His appearance is the one thing that might just bring a smile to your face in this film.

Is it any good?
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In case you haven’t gathered by now, I don’t have a terribly high opinion of Rocky V. It is tired, dated and badly written and directed. A word to the wise: save yourself over 100 minutes of your life and don’t watch this. Even if someone sounds really convincing that you should watch it, don’t. Remember kids: JUST SAY NO!

It’s difficult to know where to start with what is wrong with Rocky V, so I’ll just plough straight in with this review and see where it goes!

First of all, one of the strengths of the previous films was that they followed on from each other and were internally consistent and logical. Rocky V is not. Although the opening scenes are set in the immediate aftermath of the Drago fight from Rocky IV, after that, virtually everything that has happened during the last 14 years is forgotten and the plot just does its own thing. As a result, there’s no sense of continuity. It’s not a Rocky film – you could have called the main characters anything you liked and would still have had the same (bad) film.

The film is also an emotional void. Partly this is due to the poor acting, partly to the poor writing, and partly because you simply no longer care about the characters or their various predicaments. Rocky, such a nice, considerate guy in the previous films, suddenly becomes incredibly selfish, as he becomes obsessed with Tommy Gunn and neglects his family. Gunn himself is never given an opportunity to build any sort of character, so simply comes across as a one-dimensional sulky kid, whilst Sage Stallone, as the new boy struggling to fit in to his new neighbourhood, simply comes across as a whiny rich kid who expects the world to owe him a living. When the lead characters are so unlikeable, how on earth are you supposed to feel any concern for their predicament?

Attempts to introduce emotion are ham-fisted and clumsy. The worst culprit here is the scene in which Rocky stands in Mickey’s old gym reminiscing. There, we see (in flashback) a younger Rocky and Mickey, supposedly just before the second Creed fight. Mickey is seen telling Rocky he loves him – something which was always obvious from the earlier films but which never needed to be explicitly stated (indeed, would have been completely out of character for Mickey to do so). It’s supposed to be a tender, emotional moment. It is, frankly, a joke.

The plot is also a mess, meandering between Rocky training Tommy Gunn, Rocky Jnr’s problems at school and Washington Duke’s efforts to get Rocky back into the ring. These various plot strands are supposed to tie together to create a complete story, but they never do. They feel like three separate ideas bolted together in order to make the film reach a “respectable” running time. The plot is overly-melodramatic, with no real sense of emotional involvement or intensity and, even at a relatively short running time, still feels long and drawn out.

Worse still, the parts which have saved even the worst of the previous Rocky films – the training and fight sequences – are weak. The training sequences are a juxtaposition of Rocky training Tommy Gunn and Rocky Jnr training so that he can take on the bullies at school. Wow. The training sequences, so innovative and exciting in previous Rocky films are here reduced to a few scenes of a rubbish actor and a kid doing some exercise in a gym. How exciting.

Worse still, there isn’t even a proper fight scene Again, no matter how bad previous Rocky films have been, the fight sequence has always added a dramatic element. Not here. Tommy Gunn’s fights to the top are shown only in short bursts, so there’s not much excitement there. Whilst the final “climactic” fight between Gunn and Rocky is so badly choreographed and poorly directed that it is an embarrassment. It suffers from being over-stylised, over-directed and laughably bad. It’s supposed to be a no-holds barred street brawl, yet is actually less brutal than many of the “proper” fight scenes from the earlier films.

Finally, the problems even extend to the music. As mentioned in some of my earlier reviews, the strength of Bill Conti’s famous score was perfectly matched to the on-screen action. Even the decision in Rocky IV to move towards a greater variety of music worked, as the songs were carefully selected to match the tone and mood of the scenes they accompanied. Here, however, we get rap music. Now, I’ll admit I’m not exactly the biggest rap fan in the world, so maybe my judgement is coloured a little. However, it just seems totally out of place and unsuited to the film. It’s almost as if Stallone is trying to prove how “cool” he still is by showing he’s got his finger on the musical pulse. Sadly, it’s more like the equivalent of watching your dad dance at the disco.

Conclusion
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I’ll leave the final words of this review to my girlfriend upon whom I recently inflicted the entire Rocky saga (and we’re still together!). On finishing Rocky V, her comment was “how could they get it so wrong?” Quite. I couldn’t have put it better myself

Basic Information
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Rocky V
1990
Director: John G Avildsen
Running Time: approx. 104 minutes
Certificate: PG

Trivia
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Rocky was supposed to die in Adrian’s arms at the end of Rocky V. The reason for the change is not clear. In one interview, Stallone claimed “the studio bottled it”, whilst in another, he said he couldn’t do it because it would be “like killing Superman”.

Copyright SWSt 2007

Summary: It's a world away from Rocky