Going the Distance… Again

When we discussed the RamboThis film and media series, based on a book by David Morrell, follows the adventures of a Vietnam veteran just trying to make his way in a world that no longer wants him. films, we looked at how those movies went from a dramatic character study of the main character in First Blood into a series of dumber and dumber action films that, in effect, lost the substance that made the original film so engaging. Sylvester Stallone made a name for himself as an actor with his two most famous characters, John Rambo and Rocky Balboa, and my worry with the Rocky series was that it would, like Rambo, lose the thread of what made its lead character interesting by focusing on just the bits audiences wanted.

So far, at least in its first sequel, those worries have so far been unfounded. Rocky II, in many ways, feels like a natural extension of the first film. It continues to look at the character of Rocky Balboa, following him in his life after his (first) fight against Apollo Creed: what they fight meant for him, how his life changed, and the ways his life didn’t, in fact, change for the better. For about half its run time the sequel really takes seriously the idea of following Rocky and giving him a continued dramatic character exploration.

The issue with Rocky II is that, at a certain point, the film runs out of things to say and all it can do is repeat the beats of the first movie all over again. Creed wants to fight, Rocky has no other option ahead of him, so he has to train, prepare, and then fight again. The same fighters, the same battle, the same story all over again. The film has less to say at this point and it falls back on a formula that worked in the first film only because the conclusion didn’t feel so inevitable. Now, though, we know the beats, we know the story, and we can guess what’s going to happen. Rocky II feels like a pale imitation of the first film because it has so much less to say during its two hour runtime.

Picking up right at the end of Rocky, Rocky II gives us the concluding fight from that film again, just so we know what happens. Rocky goes the distance, but Apollo wins by split decision in a fight that, at least as far as he’s concerned, he should have won in a walk. Both fighters are taken to the hospital to recover after the beating they gave each other, and it’s there that Rocky announces his retirement from fighting, largely based on the orders of his doctors who fear that if he keeps fighting he’ll go blind in one eye (due to the damage that eye took during the fight). So he gives up the ring and, instead, focuses fully on his life with Adrian. They get married, buy a house, spend a bit too much money on dumb stuff, and then find out they’re going to have a kid.

Six months go past and the Balboas steadily run out of cash. Rocky has to find work, but there’s nothing for a washed up boxer with no high school degree to do. He eventually winds up helping at Mickey’s gym, handling menial tasks that should be beneath him. But a lifeline is once again thrown his way in the form of Apollo Creed. For the second time in a row, Creed wants to fight Rocky, now to prove that the fight was a fluke and that Creed could easily beat this two-bit boxer. Rocky has to take the fight, even if it could mean serious problems for his health, because he has no other choice. To support his family he has to step back into the ring, one more time, and maybe just become the champ we all know he could be.

I am of two minds about Rocky II, and those two minds pretty evenly split with the two halves of the film. On the one hand I really like the first hour of this sequel. Watching Rocky go about his post-fight life is fun. We get to spend time with this sweet, simple guy who just wants to do right by his girl. He doesn’t want to fight and, frankly, would be content to move on with his life if only there was anything else he was good at other than fighting. No one else seems to be interested in him, especially when he proves to be a pretty bad spokesman for productions (he’s a slow reader and a bad performer).

This slice of life side for Rocky II is really engaging, powered largely by the performances of Stallone and Talia Shire. There’s really warmth in their life together, and you enjoy seeing these two as they continue to move forward. This also makes you feel for them as they hit hardships and have to try to find ways to navigate the lows as well as their highs in their lives. Rocky II is at its best when it puts its focus squarely on Rocky and Adrian and lets you follow them through the ups and downs of their lives.

It’s at the halfway point, though, that the film stumbles and never really recovers. It’s around this point that Adrian, who is eight months pregnant at that point, has complications and has to be admitted to the hospital. The baby is born early and Adrian slips into a coma, and while Rocky sits by her bedside, waiting for her to wake up, the film grinds to an absolute halt. It’s melodrama, almost soap operatic in its construction, and it feels out of place in this film (let alone this series so far). This sequence doesn’t really add much for the characters or their situation, it’s just drama for the sake of drama and it feels cheap.

After this, once Adrian wakes up and, despite her hating the idea of Rocky fighting, tells him to win, the film changes from a character study into a repeat of the first film. We get the training montage, the shots of him running through the city, the preparation for battle and then the fight itself. At this point the film runs out of anything new or interesting to say about the character. Hell, at this point Rocky doesn’t even really feel like a character anymore. He’s just an action figure getting moved through the sequences. It’s boring and repetitive because we’ve seen all this before.

It sucks because the first film managed to find a way to keep the focus on Rocky, lending him depth and pathos even while he was training. In the sequel though, all of that solid character work is set aside so the film can run through the same paces and beats we’ve seen before, doing everything just as we remember all over again. We already know that Rocky can train, we already know that he can run, and we’ve seen him take the steps and do his victory pose. Doing it all again adds nothing to him and, in the end, even lacks that sense of catharsis we got the first time as he finally found his power within. We know the character, this is all pointless.

And then we get the fight, which is certainly action packed and brutal. But really it all amounts to giving the audiences what they wanted. Most people felt Rocky should have won the fight the first time (even though the goal for the character wasn’t winning, just going the distance), so this film is specifically designed to “fix” the one thing the first film “got wrong”. Rocky and Apollo fight again just so Rocky can win, to change the ending of the first film and let everyone have the win they felt Rocky deserved. It misses the point of the first film for big action and cheap audience thrills.

Letting Rocky win is fine if the win feels earned, but because the back half of this film drops the character focus almost entirely, it feels like it sells out Rocky so it can give him the win. That does the hero no favors and makes the sequel much weaker in the process. Letting him win needs to come after real hardship, not melodrama. It needs to feel earned, not given away freely. The film needed to put in the work to make this bout something we really cared about, and not just the inevitable machinations of the plot.

There are ways the film could have handled all this better. More focus on Rocky and Adrian in the back half certainly would have fixed a lot, but then the film really could have put more work in on Creed, Mickey, and Paulie as well. All these other characters are here simply because they were in the first film, but they really don’t have much to do besides going through the motions all over again. Rocky II would be tighter, and more interesting, if it could keep focused on the characters that matter, continuing to give us reasons to care… but the film loses sight of all that solely for the purpose of giving Rocky the win.

For half its runtime Rocky II is a solid film. Once it has to gear up for the fight, though, it loses all sense of momentum and becomes a drag to finish. I really liked the film as it was going along, but the midpoint is where it all fell apart for me and it really soured me on the film in general. Weird as it is to say, I almost wish the film could have kept Rocky out of the ring as it was at its strongest before it gave into inevitability. But reducing itself down to “Rocky fights Apollo again” what was a great film dissolves into redundant tedium, losing all that made it good in the process.