Rocky (1976)
Directed by John G. Avildsen
Rocky Balboa is a Philadelphia club fighter who seems to be going nowhere. But when a stroke of fate puts him in the ring with a world heavyweight champion, Rocky knows that it's his one shot at the big time — a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to go the distance and come out a winner!
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What critics compared Rocky to
Gyllenhaal, in a role originally written for Eminem (who eventually limited his contribution to a speed rap training anthem that’s no match for the Rocky theme), is so committed and compelling he overcomes the clichés, even when director Antoine Fuqua surrenders to them.
Sylvester Stallone made the boxing term southpaw part of the Everyday lexicon in "Rocky" and this film's finale borrows liberally from that one, one fighter's humble entrance contrasted with Vegas flash, Leila waiting in the dressing room just like Adrienne.
It may be unfair, but it's inevitable that the modern boxing movie will ultimately be compared to John Avildsen and Sylvester Stallone's scrappy but brilliant Rocky.
Although there are plenty of echoes of past boxing films, from the grit of Raging Bull to the heart of The Champ (both versions) as well as the Rocky pics , Champion, Somebody Up There Likes Me and others, this movie has a beating heart of its own.
Boxing films already possess a stigma thanks to the Rocky franchise (save the first ending against expectations in a way that made it near impossible to be a copycat by shunning the “happily ever after”).
But, this is a fantasy rags-to-riches, brothers-in-competition saga that bargains on its “Rocky” and “The Fighter” influences, but tries to be more intense, and less inspirational, than its predecessors.
…aking an unusually respectful approach to the new sport of mixed martial arts (MMA), "Warrior" refurbishes material we've seen in the "Rocky" films and a thousand other populist dramas about ordinary people making their mark.
As the film works its way toward the pivotal fight, unlike the Rocky movies, Warrior has two combatants to embrace and cheer for.
A double-barreled " Rocky " for the mixed martial arts generations, the practically epic fight film " Warrior " is one of the most exhilarating surprises of this summer movie season.
Like Rocky (1976), the patron saint of all gritty underdog sports movies, Warrior has its roots in the working class milieu of Philadelphia.
So the up-and-coming combat sport of Mixed Martial Arts finally has its “Rocky.”
Hence the “Rocky” franchise, and hence the conventional climax of “The Fighter,” with Micky confronting an Irishman named Shae Neary (Anthony Molinari), who appears to be hewn from basalt.
Nor does he fill his story with phony, “Rocky”-like uplift.
The primal thrill of great boxing movies - Body and Soul and The Set-Up, Rocky and Raging Bull, Million Dollar Baby and Somebody Up There Likes Me - cannot be denied.
(The anti-Rocky, Raging Bull garnered precious few kudos back in 1980; great filmmaking aside, theres nothing feel-good about Martin Scorseses portrait of Jake LaMotta.)
, whose career, as managed by his scabrous mom Alice ( Melissa Leo ) and cokehead trainer and older half brother Dicky Eklund (Bale), is rocky (and "Rocky") at best.
So in that sense, Rocky, The Wrestler, Fat City, Cinderella Man, Requiem for a Heavyweight, and even a Mike Tyson documentary are all more or less the same.
As it turns out, Real Steel, directed by Night at the Museum’s Shawn Levy, borrows so much from other films that it might better be titled Reel Steal: not only from The Champ, but from Rocky, the Transformers movies and even some Star Wars.
The story -- which draws inspiration from "Rocky," "Over the Top," "Pokémon" and Fred Savage's "The Wizard" -- is set about 15 years from now.
The match between the two machines, billed as the biggest thing in boxing since the Rumble in the Jungle, is the climax of Real Steel, a futuristic Rocky set in the world of robot wrestling.
The filmmakers owe a lot to the "Rocky" movies - the big final fight borrows strategy liberally from Balboa/Lang II - but at least they steal from the good ones.
There's really no excuse for Real Steel, a Frankenstein contraption made up of spare parts from middle-American fairytales like Field of Dreams and underdog sports intrigues starting with Rocky , I guess, and building all the way through to junk like The Rookie and any number of films just like it that appear with what seems like annual reliability.
Long time comedy director Shawn Levy (“Date Night,” “Big Fat Liar,” “Night(s) at the Museum”) takes on sci-fi and boxing with his robotic homage to “Rocky.”
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Rocky and Creed are great, but they do glorify boxing as something heroic and/or intrinsically American.
The Smashing Machine’s anti-biopic approach plays more like a modern, realist update of “Rocky” and less like a revisionist take on the “Rocky” sequels.
…and like Rocky, it finds failure meaningful…
Where other sports films, from Rocky to The Iron Claw, get up close and personal with the characters, essentially getting in the ring with them, Safdie and team unwisely maintain a degree of separation.
Even in the case of something like Rocky, it doesn’t even matter that he loses to Apollo Creed, as merely holding his own feels like a triumph.
…a similar, world-weary vulnerability that Sylvester Stallone showed in ROCKY…
It’s the same simple “Rocky” knock-off, with a couple of extra subplots thrown in – and the pre-teen equivalent of violence-porn.
The simplistic but undeniably effective 1984 film The Karate Kid massaged the classic David-and-Goliath underdog theme with the outcast wish-fulfillment of any kid who's ever wanted to best a bully; not by coincidence was it directed by the Rocky-meister, John G. Avildsen.
The lineage of the film is distinguished; the 1984 version was directed by John Avildsen , director of " Rocky ."
Granted, the same pretty much held true the first time around as director John G. Avildsen was simply retreading his own "Rocky" underdog storyline as mixed with the old Charles Atlas "98-pound weakling beats up the bullies" fantasy.
What “The Karate Kid” is honest about, though, is in giving its audience exactly what it’s buying tickets for — a middle-school, martial-arts “Rocky,” with a plucky underdog finally winning big.
It worked so well that director John G. “Rocky” Avildsen helmed two sequels (although the final installment barely blipped the box office charts).
Unlike films like “Rocky” and “Invincible,” Marty’s passion doesn’t lift others up but often brings them down.
…people will watch a Rocky-esque movie like theirs…
This is ultimately satisfying like how The Karate Kid or Rocky is satisfying, just in a deeper way.
Like the original Rocky, Mauser doesn’t quite get what he hopes for, but gets to go out in a blaze of glory…
…he's crafted a grand, upturned fairy tale that feels like funhouse reflection inverse of Rocky. Where Rocky's defeat was a spiritual victory, Marty's victory feels like a spiritual defeat…
Safdie has basically taken the broader Rocky/Karate Kid formula of “someone fighting against the odds and their own personal demons to give their best, scrappy shot at their given sport”…
In many ways it’s a turn that reminds of Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront and Sylvester Stallone in Rocky , that blue collar performance where a humbling charm covers a raging beast within, Hardy’s quiet intensity deployed to startling effect alongside a warmth that makes his Bob a character to like, as well as to be fearful of.
Hardy, the hunky Englishman who was the masked villain Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises,” is a revelation in a meek meat-head role that recalls Sylvester Stallone in the original “Rocky.”
And Nadia (Noomi Rapace) is a timid Rocky-like local girl, who warily welcomes Bob into her life after he finds a mewling pit-bull puppy in her trash can.
Dennis Lehane’s short story, “Animal Rescue,” has a touch of “Rocky” about it on the big screen, a big galoot softened by a pet and the woman who seems to come with that pet.
Just as "Rocky" was a love letter to an urban neighborhood trapped in a sports cliche, Roskam crafts a crime story that soars in its attention to local detail.
Part “Rocky,” part “On the Waterfront,” and part image boost for the pit-bull breed, the film is directed by Michael R. Roskam, who made “Bullhead,” the Belgian stunner set in the illegal beef-hormone market.
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The film’s genius is in its subtleties, which combine to make it more than just a “Rocky”-style underdog drama.
Public interest begins with the do-or-die of the mans very participation, a last chance at redemption not unrelated to the ancillary vibes of what Rocky meant for its writer and star.
Gritty, blue-collar US sports films were a genre unto themselves in the 1970s, from John Huston's 1972 boxing melodrama Fat City to Sylvester Stallone's 1976 breakthrough role in Rocky and the vastly underrated hockey flick Slap Shot with Paul Newman in 1977.
Screenwriter Robert D. Siegel’s script — which touches lightly but significantly on "Rocky" and "The Passion of the Christ" — is unvarnished, conversational and free of clumsy exposition.
If you've never seen, for starters, the "Rocky" movies or "Requiem for a Heavyweight" or "Somebody Up There Likes Me" or "Raging Bull," you might be forgiven in thinking "The Wrestler" was an original.
In its own tough-love way, the movie is as sentimental as "The Champ" or "Rocky."
Eastwood has crafted a boxing movie that holds more akin to the 1956 Paul Newman starrer, “Somebody Up There Likes Me,” or “Requiem For A Heavyweight” than the “Rocky” franchise, to which it is most compared.
At least when Burgess Meredith did this stuff in the “Rocky” movies he had the good hammy sense to treat it like the hokum it was.
But she wears him down, and we figure we're in for another "Rocky."
The characters and dialogue bob and weave between Fat City authenticity, Rocky blue-collar romanticism and movie-of-the-week contrivance as the film pokes at the underbelly of society.
There is even a Villain, in the person of dirty-fighting former prostitute Billie "The Blue Bear" (Lucia Rijker), this movie's Mr. T to Maggie's Rocky.
Contrary to how the trailers make it appear, "Million Dollar Baby" is no mere distaff "Rocky."