the film that put Sly back on top

We look at the film that put Sylvester Stallone back at the top after ten years of flops: Rocky Balboa.

The early 2000s were a bad time for Sylvester Stallone professionally. In the mid-1990s, after a short-lived revival of three hit films, Cliff hanger, Demolition man And The SpecialistStallone’s career as a bankable action star began to sputter Judge Dredd, Murderers And Daylight all lost money. Coplandan indie drama directed by James Mangold, made money and gave Stallone his best reviews since the original Rockybut his sequels were disastrous. His attempt at a slasher/horror film, D-Toxwas shelved for years and was finally released under the lame title Eye you see. His 2000 remake of Get Carter was another disaster, with critics eviscerating him for remaking the Michael Caine classic, with even a cameo from Caine himself failing to dampen their anger. In 2001 he collaborated with Cliffhanger’s Renny Harlin about a so-called blockbuster that goes bankrupt Driven.

With a huge budget, a lot went wrong before then Driven right off the bat. Stallone planned to make a Formula 1 racing epic, but ended up making it about the short-lived CART open-wheel car racing organization. To put it in context, imagine if Oliver Stone had created it Any given Sunday about the XFL instead of the NFL. The film flopped poorly, which wasn’t helped by the fact that the originally planned three-hour epic was cut down to two hours, with some terrible continuity errors evident throughout the film. The DVD does indeed contain 51 minutes of deleted footage. For Stallone, it was an embarrassing failure and a film he always says he wishes he had never made.

It was at this point that Stallone’s career, at least for a while, seemed over. He starred in the direct-to-video mafia comedy Avenge Angelo and an indie film called Shadow, which also went straight to video. His most famous role was as the villain in Robert Rodriguez Spy kids 3D. Stallone focused mainly on TV, with a recurring role in Vegas opposite his old friend James Caan and the reality TV show The contender.

All in all, it was a bad time for Stallone’s career, and it seemed like he would never recapture his former glory. But the thing is, failure can sometimes be a great motivator, and as Stallone himself revealed Rocky IIIIf you lose the “Eye of the Tiger”, you must get it back. If you look at the Rocky series, it’s not hard to escape the fact that Stallone had become an Apollo Creed-like figure in his later films. But Stallone had a plan. He put pen to paper and began planning a comeback vehicle that would see him reprise his most enduring role, Rocky. Indeed, the character had rescued his career from purgatory twice before Rocky II are post-Paradise alley And FIST comeback. At the same time, Rocky III put him back on top after a series of flops in the early 1980s.

Although it wouldn’t be easy. Stallone was no longer bankable. While all Rocky films (except the first) had been relatively lavish productions, this time Stallone would have to make do with a relatively sparse budget and a shorter shooting schedule than he was used to. The consensus among the studios was that, given that Rocky V was a flop, the series was finished.

Stallone thought differently. Rocky V had never sat well with him, and neither had the idea of ​​retiring Rocky due to a potentially fatal brain injury. After watching George Foreman become the oldest heavyweight boxing champion in history, Stallone began planning Rocky’s return. It took him years to refine the story, and some tough choices were made along the way. Most serious of all was the fate of Talia Shire’s Adrian. Shire is of course still alive and has a good relationship with Stallone. But while he was writing the movie, he realized that Rocky’s comeback would be more dramatic if he lost the one person who always believed in him: Adrian. As such, he killed her, which gives the character much more pathos because he no longer has her to lean on.

In Rocky Balboasome events of Rocky V are ignored, with Balboa no longer in as much financial trouble as in the last film. He is a successful restauranteur and owner of an Italian eatery called Adrians, where he regales customers with stories about the glory days and his friendship with Apollo Creed. It’s a satisfying place for the Italian stallion to end up with his son Robert, now played by Milo Ventimiglia, a young lawyer from whom Rocky is somewhat estranged. In the film, Sly is lured out of retirement when the current champion, Mason “The Line” Dixon, played by real-life champion Antonio Tarver, is ridiculed for never having faced a real champion, and is infuriated by an ESPN simulation that suggests Rocky Balboa. , in his prime, would have defeated him. His managers want him to gain some goodwill, so they challenge Rocky, who has regained his boxing license.

As far as the Rocky films go, a lot of effort has gone into making this realistic. For starters, Mason Dixon is far from a villain, with him just a perhaps slightly selfish boxer, and the film never pretends that Rocky could beat him in a fight due to the age difference. But when Mason injures his hand, the fight becomes closer than expected, with Mason finally meeting an opponent with a real heart and Rocky getting to unleash some of the stuff “in the basement.”

One thing that surprised viewers Rocky Balboa back in 2006 was how incredible the writing was, and some of Balboa’s dialogue became many memes in subsequent years. The fight scenes in the film were also stripped down compared to the OG series fights, with Stallone saying they used more realistic sound effects in the fights to make them calmer and more realistic. The film also offered the late Burt Young a great final turn as Paulie, showing more pathos than ever in his final entry into the series, while Geraldine Hughes delivers a stellar performance as Marie, the now grown-up version of the young woman who famously became. called Rocky a “creepo” in the original film.

When it came out during the Christmas holidays of 2006, Rocky Balboawhich box office forecasters predicted would flop was a surprise hit. It grossed $70 million domestically, plus another $85 million internationally on a modest budget of $24 million. Even the critics who have criticized the last few Rocky movies couldn’t deny that once the classic Bill Conti music started, it was hard not to get reinvested in the Italian stallion. Above all, it was the starting signal for a major career revival for Stallone, who ultimately recaptured the zeitgeist in a way that his contemporaries like Arnold Schwarzenegger never quite managed. While he probably thought he was done with Rocky Balboa after a satisfying ending to the saga, this turned out not to be the case when a young director named Ryan Coogler came knocking. But that’s a story for another day, but as it is, Rocky Balboa is a strong entry into the saga and ultimately gave Stallone a comeback worthy of him.