3. Rocky
The original Rocky is undoubtedly a classic of the sports film genre, and surely one of the best ever made. It had so much heart and emotion, made a great use of its New York setting, and created a star out of lead and screenwriter Sylvester Stallone, who received Academy Award nominations for both. The film received a total of 10 Academy Award nominations in all, and ended up spawning a series that ended up lasting six films, concluding with a fairly definitive full-stop on
Rocky Balboa. Though
Rocky II is generally regarded as a solid follow-up, its greater indulgence in the hokey heroics makes it a lesser film than the original, and much the same can be said of
Rocky III; it is an entertaining diversion but not a patch on the original. It is with
Rocky IV that things get problematic; by this point the series has become a joke unto itself, an effort of self-parody, in fact, as Rocky faces off against Dolph Lundgren's absurdly homo-erotic Russian villain, Ivan Drago. The film is essentially a campy work of Cold War propaganda, painting the Russian Drago as mechanical and synthetic, while Balboa is of course a hard-working man's man, who in the end wins over the Russian crowd, defeats Drago, and wishes that we can all just get along. While perversely amusing, it is surely a work of unintentional hilarity.
Rocky V returned to grittiness, but proved the worst entry of all, stripping away the more savoury thrills of the original films, taking Rocky back to the streets, brain damaged and broke, with what was to be an extremely unsatisfactory close to the series, and one that Stallone himself admitted was made purely out of greed. Thankfully, Stallone returned to make one final film, Rocky Balboa, which gave the character the emotional send-off audiences needed, but it was an act of self-preservation more than anything; the good name of the original Rocky had already been tainted by the progressively worse sequels, and this one was a mere act of damage control, to give one lasting impression of the heroic figure. Still, when many of us think of Rocky, we're probably thinking of Ivan Drago and that ridiculous montage sequence... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwvoTDoO9Hg