Sylvester Stallone

After years of shallow success, Rocky gets his ass handed to him.

What made the first two Rocky movies great was they were basically dramas about Rocky and Adrian, and those two characters just work great together. The boxing stuff was a secondary part of the story. Rocky III, however, is pure boxing movie. If you hadn't seen the first two movies, you wouldn't even know the characters from watching this one. That said, it's very entertaining for a sports movie. Especially when all sorts of show more crazy stuff comes out of Mr. T's mouth. show less

Yo! I can't be unselfconscious enough just to write "a classic story", but I like the kind of story that inspires you to write "a classic story" about it. Rocky as a film gets by on aesthetic and affect--crumbling industrial Philly, the young-Brandoness that Stallone was so definitively to lose shortly thereafter, that amazing pale illuminated quality that films from the '70s share but that gets brought out further when you're looking at the smoggy sunrise over the city on the dawn of a show more clear cold day. This is what makes it great--the script is a fair nonentity, a vessel or coathanger. It's not true of all film scripts, but it's a good reason not to review many (this one I used for a project on the Philly dialect, which the film does badly but not as badly as people like to say; hence, inclusion). I do think it does the rambling bits where Rocky tries to impress Adrian well--there's a sweetness to the cluelessness of the dialogue that could have been just generic and wooden and comes from the words as they are rather than Sly's delivery. Also, Apollo Creed is a great character, even if inaccurate as a dig at Ali. show less

I missed this when it came out and am now seeing it 35 years later. I was surprised to learn that it was written by Stallone, filmed for 1 mi. and done in a little over a month. Excellent, no doubt about this, but seems dated, a bit slow. All that time skating around the ice skating rink just to set the background in dialogue. I had just seen Saturday Night Fever, that had many similar lower middle class Italisnisms, but SNF was far sharper, dialogue, plot, even the more explicit sexuality.

You might not believe this, but Stallone can actually write. I don't think this work was ghost-written, so perhaps I shouldn't rate his work so harshly. Sadly, though, for all the good work Stallone has put in, he can only be judged by literary standards - if all writers were schlock-movie actors as well, this would be a classic, but it isn't Tolstoy despite being set, for a time, in Russia.