‘Creed III’ Review: A Franchise Finds New Fertile Ground (Published 2023) (2024)

The tears flow as freely as the blood in “Creed III,” the latest entry in the apparently indestructible “Rocky” saga. Once again, Adonis Creed — the tough but tender, gruff but gentle heavyweight boxer played by Michael B. Jordan — must be knocked down so that he can rise higher still. That story line is a metaphor for life, no doubt. It’s also a perfect distillation of this franchise, which has had repeated ups and downs during its staggering 47-year run.

In 1976, the year that Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky sprinted up the long steps leading to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gerald R. Ford was president and most of the principal cast of “Creed III” wasn’t yet born. The2015 release of “Creed,” seventh in the series, inaugurated a narrative shift that found Rocky taking on the role of the avuncular trainer, a part he also played three years later in the sequel. Stallone isn’t in this latest chapter. While his absence has obvious resonance, if you were expecting some kind of Hamlet-style anguish or even a hint of misty melancholia about the now-absent symbolic father, forget it. This isn’t the Sly Stallone show; it’s Michael B. Jordan’s, from first scene to last.

For this installment, Jordan has taken over as both the star and the director (it’s his feature debut), twinned roles that he has assumed with seamless assurance. As entertaining as it is predictable, “Creed III” does exactly what you expect, delivering nicely balanced helpings of intimacy and spectacle, grit and glamour. It’s enjoyably old-school Hollywood in how squarely it hits all the familiar genre beats — even as it pragmatically advances the series — yet it’s also very much of the moment in how it grapples with family, friendship and the complexities of contemporary masculinity, its pleasures and its burdens.

Every boxer needs a challenger, a hard body to spar with physically and otherwise. Here, that foe is Damian, a childhood friend of Adonis (Donnie to his pals), a walking wound played as an adult by Jonathan Majors. (In flashback, Spence Moore II and Thaddeus James Mixson Jr. play the characters as adolescents.) After the usual recap — now retired, Donnie is fabulously successful and settled down with his family — Damian appears in a hoodie one day outside Donnie’s gym while leaning on the champ’s Rolls-Royce. It’s an image that’s more biting than any line of dialogue, all the more so because an irritated Donnie doesn’t at first recognize Damian, a scene that Jordan invests with dramatic tension and visceral unease.

That sense of disquiet remains as an enigmatically wary Donnie and an unreadable Damian share a meal and guarded laughs, and the story’s (too) many pieces begin sharply clicking into place. The movie is a continuation of Creed’s story, and a further burnishing of a new big-screen myth — one that is now refracted through Damian and his desire to get back into the ring. A Golden Gloves fighter as a teen, Damian wants to reclaim his boxing glory and resume a trajectory cut short by prison. That’s exactly what happens, more or less, despite Donnie’s reservations, the strong objections of his business partner, Tony (Wood Harris), and some complications with Donnie’s mother, Mary-Anne (Phylicia Rashad).

Like many actors-turned-directors, Jordan does very fine work with the performers, including in his scenes with Tessa Thompson, who again plays Bianca, his lover and now wife. Her character doesn’t have all that much to do (a musician, she has given up performing), but Thompson’s charisma ensures that the character never registers like an afterthought or an appendage to the male protagonist. There’s no question that Jordan is the star, as his ample screen time affirms — the man certainly knows his best camera angles and when to strip down — but what gives the movie interest and heft is how it insistently deploys other characters to complicate and recast the classic figure of the rugged American individual.