In preperation for watching Creed III I have recently watched all of the Rocky movies including Rocky Balboa. Today I watched Creed and Creed II.
Creed
So far through my Rocky movie trip I’ve just enjoyed spending time with Rocky. This movie gives me that. Adonis winning Rocky over is predictable as you can imagine. The plot lines are enjoyable despite this and my main worry is that these movies without Stallone won’t be as enjoyable.
Having Adonis not win his fight is a nice throwback to the original. I really enjoyed Tessa Thompson’s performance. Stallone is still great at playing a character that he obviously loves.
Creed II
Very interesting how this contains a bunch of the plot points from Rocky II and IV. I enjoyed this one more than the first only due to all of the callbacks to the original movies.
Rocky movies always had a lot of heart, and they are heavily leaning into that with this movie. There’s this great shot of Tessa soon after having their baby where she’s sleeping in the hospital bed with her arm over her baby. Very realistic and nice to see. Rocky shares some great parenting advice throughout which I also enjoyed (I’m a sap).
So all in all, Creed II felt like a worthy Rocky movie to me. I still like Rocky more than any other character.