Reviewed: Rocky Balboa (2006), that part at the end

Even without the fact that, watching it, Joe and I got completely nostalgic for Philly, the movie was pretty damn good. Vintage Stallone lookin’ all old and awesome at once. But then—I don’t even want to say it—it’s at the part of the fight where everything goes slo-mo and you can hear Rocky’s thoughts and he says, “What was it that I told the kid? [so the audience knows he is remembering] It ain’t about how hard you hit but how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward” [so the audience knows he’s going to keep standing and make it through Adrian’s death.]

Who authorized this? Who thought it was a better idea than, say, layering the scene or inserting a simple voice over flashback? I would have gotten the significance, as would any semi-intelligent person that has ever watched movies that weren’t silent films. All it succeeded in doing was turning the end of Rocky into a Jean-Claude Van Damme movie, when there shouldn’t even be a comparison between Rocky and Van Damme. Rocky is about love and honor and revenge and inner demons, and Van Damme is about revenge and honor and….okay, fine. But the difference is that Rocky really means it. Van Damme just sucks.

57 Stars. It didn’t completely ruin the movie, which says something. (And Little Marie was pretty good.)