Not Coming to a Theater Near You

Rocky IV / USA! / 1985

Rocky IV is a strange artifact of the Cold War, made more strange to me because I used to really like it. Shamelessly jingoistic, nationalistic, and improbable, the film quite inauspiciously ends Sylvester Stallone’s career as a film director (at least for now: Rocky VI is said to be in production). Beginning with a highly unsuspenseful exhibition bout between Apollo Creed and testy-tube commie Drago (featuring an appearance by James Brown and ending in disaster for the hubristic Apollo), Rocky IV strings together a series of disconnected speeches and vignettes about getting old, going out on top, good ol’ American perseverance versus Nazi-like Soviet techno-athletics, and a toy robot. The requisite montage of Rocky’s training (which here takes place in the Siberian hinterlands and involves a lot of farm equipment) seems to make up for roughly a third of the film’s running time. Another third is devoted to the interminable final match between Rocky and Drago (see if you can guess who wins), which looks like it was shot in a high school gymnasium decorated with enormous 1930s-era banners of Lenin and Marx. As round after round ends in a dizzyingly boring succession of dissolves, Stallone and Dolph Lundgren pretend to hit each other and look tired with little sign of bloodshed. And once Rocky rallies to defeat his Red nemesis, the people of the USSR (along with their Gorbachev look-alike premier) are miraculously won over, especially when they hear Rocky’s eloquent oration on political freedom, the (surely unilateral?) possibility for “change,” and potatoes for everyone. If that’s not enough to make one defect, I don’t know what is.

The film’s only major disappointment is a lack of screen-time for a pre-Foofy Foofy Brigitte Nielsen, who plays Drago’s icy KGB-indoctrinated wife.

by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Cable television broadcast
03 Apr 2005 2:27 PM | Comments (1)

Comments / 1 total / Submit Comment

1. Rumsey / 3 April 2005 / 9:39 PM / URL

   No comment, just drawing attention to the subversive exclamation point.

   Cle. Ver.