If Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania had me questioning Jonathan Majors’ decision to join a longtime franchise by playing a new adversary, Creed III makes me think it’s not such a bad strategy.
Majors is easily the best thing in this third Rocky offshoot. He plays Damian Anderson, a childhood friend of now-retired boxing champ Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan). After serving 18 years in prison (for reasons I won’t spoil), Damian shows up at the training facility Adonis owns, hoping Adonis will help revive the boxing career that Damian dreamed of before he was imprisoned.
Thanks to Majors’ prickly and unpredictable performance (no surprise for anyone who came to know him from 2019’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco), we’re both sympathetic to and wary of Dame. Reuniting with Adonis over a meal, Dame bristles with both shame and anger (he seems like a man unsure of how to move in society after all those years away), yet there’s a hint of wily ambition as well. A few other details—including the dirty tactics Damian brings into the sparring ring once Adonis agrees to take him on—add to our unease. Even as we, like Adonis, want to see Damian turn his life around, Majors also makes him a vibrating threat.
This is tricky territory. In the less sure moments of Creed III—which marks Jordan’s debut as a director, as well—Damian comes across as a pure villain, a portrayal that unnecessarily demonizes a group of people (the formerly incarcerated) who are already viewed by society at large with suspicion. But thanks to Majors’ performance and some revelations about Adonis’ possible culpability in the trajectory that Damian’s life took, the narrative also contains some complicated ambiguity. When the movie is at its best, Damian comes across as a “villain” with a valid point—interestingly, much like Jordan’s Erik Killmonger did in Black Panther.
Among the returning players is Tessa Thompson as Adonis’ wife Bianca, also retired from her performing career. There is some domestic drama involving Adonis and their growing daughter (Mila Davis-Kent), but Thompson’s best scene, unsurprisingly, comes with Majors, when Damian tries to sow seeds of dissatisfaction by suggesting that her career, like his boxing dreams, has been cut short. Notably missing from the film is Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa. As much as I’ve enjoyed his rumpled appearances in the previous movies, I can’t say he was missed here. It was time to move on.
How about the boxing itself? Unfortunately, the fight scenes have been offering diminishing returns over the course of the Creed movies, largely due to an increasing reliance on special effects. One bold move in this direction does work—a minute or so during Adonis and Damian’s match where everything outside of the ring fades to black and objects from their shared past, such as the bars of a jail cell, enter the ring—but otherwise Creed III continues Creed II’s use of green-screen backgrounds to fill in the “arena,” along with a few slow-motion, Matrix-style shots of crucial punches. Both techniques have the feel of something constructed far away from the blood and sweat of a ring.
(3/8/2023)
