Rocky IV - Cheap Thoughts

I've only begun watching the Rocky movies this past year in anticipation of Creed, and despite it being the least good so far from a technical stand point, the one that has stuck out to me so far is Rocky IV. Keep in mind i haven't seen Rocky V or Rocky Balboa yet, though I hear Rocky V sucked even worse. With that being said, Rocky IV is the 4th instalment in the Rocky franchise (Obviously) and it follows the story of Rocky and his former rival, now friend Apollo Creed coming out of retirement to fight against Ivan Drago, played by Dolph Lundgren. From there you get a whole lot of your Rocky cliches, Adrian being against Rocky fighting again, just to come around later, the training montage, the big climactic fight at the end and Rocky single handedly stopping the cold war, typical Rocky movie.

So what is it about this movie that makes it stand out to me? It's weird. Simple as that. A franchise that started out as the grounded and realistic story of an average schmuk like Rocky Balboa rising as the underdog and coming out...well, watch the movie to find out. Here we have a rich & famous Rocky with a robot as Paulie's servant and what is pretty much a supervillain as his enemy and-oh yeah-Rocky ends the cold war! Well okay I may be exaggerating that last point, but considering the movie is an America vs Russia story and the film ends with Rocky giving a big speech about change and working together, come on, the cold war metaphor is less subtle than the Jesus metaphor in The Matrix.

But the funny thing is, even with this being a complete betrayal of what Rocky originally stood for, it's just so fascinatingly odd that i can't dislike it, Paulie has a semi-sentient robot as his implied girlfriend, how do you react to that!? And you can't blame the movie for being cliched, because this is Rocky, the entire franchise is built on these cliches all the way back to the first one. Then there's Drago...god i fucking love Drago, he is literally a supervillain! All the prior Rocky movies had him fight against real people, Apollo Creed was his respected rival, Clubber Lang was a dick but still a person. Drago is like the Russian Captain America, he's been experimented on to be the perfect fighter, has barely any dialogue outside of "i must break you" and "if he dies, he dies" this isn't a boxer, this is a fucking Street Fighter character! He's cheesy, sinister and menacing, i fucking love everything about Drago.

The music is also insane. Rocky has always been known for having great training montages set to great music, Gonna Fly Now, Eye of the Tiger, they're all great, here we have probably the best Rocky soundtrack so far. Hearts on Fire makes for a great work-out track that can get everybody pumped, No Easy Way Out works similarly to get you excited but used in a different context in the movie, more of a reflective state oddly enough. Oh and a performance of Living in America by James Brown...again, this was a weird movie. But seriously, amazing soundtrack here,

The plot of the film is very cliched but again, it's a Rocky movie, you expect this, it's not the plot that people come for, it's the characters, the dialogue, the music, the montages, so it's not fair to criticise it in that aspect, atleast in my opinion. I will say the movie does throw a wrench into the plot halfway through which was...unusual. I won't spoil it, but a big change is made for one of the characters and it feels like a cheap way to cause character development and emotional change in another character, which is usually a no-no, having characters go through tragedy for the sake of other characters development is usually disrespectful to the former and cheap for the latter.

Overall, Rocky IV is a weird movie, it's absolutely jumped the shark but it's also fun as hell and honestly even though i know it's not the best Rocky movie, it's the one i want to watch again more than any other. I give Rocky IV a 7/10.

-Danny