Latest Balboa instalment less about Rocky

I’ve never seen a boxing film where the punches felt harder — even 10 rows back from the screen — than they do in Creed II.

Sylvester Stallone stars as Rocky Balboa and Michael B. Jordan as Adonis Creed in Creed II.

You know you’ve been in the ring for a while when you think back to the original Rocky and realise you were on the cusp of teenhood at the time. Four decades later we are up to the eighth movie, Creed II, in which former heavyweight boxing champion Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallon­e) is long retired, a widower and a grandfather. Rocky’s great rival, Apollo Creed, is dead, having been beaten to death during a bout in Rocky IV (1985). His fighter son, Adonis Creed (Michae­l B. Jordan), who we met in the previous movie, Creed (2015), has dad on his mind and Rocky in his corner, as his trainer and de facto father.

The doped-up Soviet boxer who killed Adonis’s father, Ivan Drago (Swedish actor Dolph Lundgren), is still alive. Tellingly, he is one of the first people we see in the new movie. He has a son, too, Viktor Drago (Florian Muntean­u).

Obviously the two boys are going to fight. As one of the ringside commentators puts it later on, we have a Shakespearean set-up.

Dolph Lundgren, left, and Florian Munteanu in a scene from "Creed II."

“What if I am this chunk of yesterday trying to be today?” Rocky asks. He’s in a cemetery, speaking to his dead wife, Adrian, and it’s a good question. Rocky was a wildcard movie in 1976. Made for nothing, it knocked out its rivals at the box office and at the Oscars, winning best picture and best director for John G. Avildsen. Stallone, the brains behind the bulk, was nominated as best actor and for best original screenplay. He wrote all of the Rocky movies and, though he did not write Creed, he returns as co-writer of this sequel.

Four years after Rocky, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro made the best boxing movie yet, Raging Bull. There have been some strong contenders since, including Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby (2004), Russell Crowe in Cinderella Man (2005), Christian Bale in The Fighter (2010) and Jake Gyllenhaal in the under­rated Southpaw (2015).

Even so, old Mr Balboa’s question remains pertinent. Another Rocky movie? Do we need that? Perhaps not of itself, but one of Stallone’s qualities, as this screen character and as the person off screen who holds the white towel, who could call off the bout, is modesty.

His ongoing involvementpartly explains why it still works. He has brought on a young direct­or, Steven Caple, who won plaudits for his previous, and first, feature, The Land(2016), about teenage skateboarders who want to go professional.

As with its predecessor, Creed II is less about Rocky Balboa and more about the other people in his life. This is a boxing series in which women matter.

Adonis’s moments with his singer girlfriend Bianca (Tess Thompson) are highlights, as is his time with their baby daughter. The night he proposes looks tougher than any fight, as does the one where he has to go solo parenting.

His relationship with his mother, Mary Anne (Phylicia Rashad), is also central. I saw this at a crowded cinema and I got the impressio­n the movie worked for both genders.

And then we have the Dragos. Viktor is a huge man. Munteau is a professional boxer in Romania. This is his first film role.

Viktor is unbeatab­le. No fight has ever lasted longer than four rounds. “He’s huge, but he’s raw,’’ Rocky tells Adonis. Yet when Viktor looks at his father there is fear in his face. Munteau’s performance, as a man who is hard but uncertain, perhaps even scared, suggest­s he has a future outside the ring.

Tessa Thompson plays Adonis Creed’s girlfriend.

Lundgren has thanked Stallone for bringing him back for this movie, for giving him the chance to show he is a serious actor. Unlike Rocky IV this is not about the underdog Stars and Stripes versus the robotic Soviets. It’s about damaged men, damaged families on both sides. If anything, Lundgren’s character — humiliated by the state after losing to Rocky in Moscow at the end of Rocky IV — is the weakest of them all.

The fact that Munteanu is a boxer made preparation hard. We all know about De Niro's remarkable weight loss and gain in Raging Bull. Here, Munteanu had to lose weight and Jordan, a smaller man, had to gain weight. As this is a film, not real life, they had to look big but less bulky than a boxer, shredded with eight-pack abdominals and so on. The obligatory pre-fight training regimes of both men is good to watch.

It more or less works, though there are a coupl­e of still moments, such as when the two fighters do the PR face-to-face before the bout, where it’s clear one bloke is far bigger than the other. But when the quiet ends and the fight begin­s it looks superb under Kramer Morgenthau’s camerawork. I don’t think I have sat befor­e a boxing film where the punches felt harder, even 10 rows back from the screen.

Florian Munteanu, left, and Michael B. Jordan face off in a scene from the film.

There is no superhero movie choreography like that Jordan did so well as the baddie in this year’s Black Panther. It looks like a real fight, and based on what Munteanu has said in interviews, it was at times as the actors got up close and personal. As he noted in one interview, this is not a movie about basketball.

Creed II (M) 3 stars

National release