Creed (MGM, Warner Bros., New Line Cinema, Chartoff-Winkler Productions.2015_

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, May 24) my husband Charles and I watched a really schizoid movie, Creed, a 2015 film directed and co-written by Ryan Coogler. On one hand it’s a Coogleresque saga of a young Black kid who learns of his family’s history and becomes a figure of destiny who has to prove himself in combat with his family’s enemies, which in essence was also the plot of Coogler’s best-known film, Black Panther. On the other hand, it’s also an episode in the ongoing Rocky universe, featuring not only Rocky Balboa himself (played, as always, by Sylvester Stallone, who couldn’t act when he made the original Rocky in 1975 and hadn’t got any better at it in the intervening 40 years) but also Rocky’s principal opponent in the first film, Apollo Creed. Michael B. Jordan, who also starred in Coogler’s first directorial effort, Fruitvale Station (named after the BART station that serves Black Oakland), plays Adonis Johnson, who unbeknownst to him (but pretty much beknownst to us from the get-go) is really the son of the late heavyweight champion Apollo Creed. We first see him as a boy (played by Alex Henderson) in a detention facility in Oakland in 1998 (Coogler is from Oakland and he likes to begin his heroes’ quests there) in which he’s been put in solitary confinement because of a fight he got into with one of the other inmates. An immaculately dressed Black woman named Mary Anne (Phylicia Rashad) shows up at the facility and demands to see him. At first Adonis is skeptical, thinking she’s a social worker come to take him to a group home, but she turns out to be … well, not his mother, exactly, but as close to one as he’s going to get.

It turns out Adonis was the product of Apollo Creed and a woman with whom he was having extra-relational activity, but with both his biological parents dead Mary Anne, Creed’s widow, is offering to take him in and raise him as her own. She lives in a palatial mansion – obviously Apollo Creed saved his money and left his wife a sizable fortune that’s still enough to support both her and his son by another woman – and young Adonis is stunned by his new surroundings in a scene that echoes everything from Oliver Twist to Annie. The scene flashes forward to 2015 L.A., where Adonis Johnson (he’s using his biological mother’s last name) is an executive at some firm or another (it’s not clear just what his job is or what the company he works for does). He’s just received a big promotion, but he decides to quit and pursue his long-standing dream of becoming a boxer, in search of which he’s already been sneaking off to Tijuana for 15 professional fights in Mexico. He’s entirely self-trained, and he’s decided that in order to fulfill his dream of becoming a champion prizefighter he needs to go to Philadelphia and get Rocky Balboa to train him. Rocky is semi-retired and running a restaurant called Adrian’s; he’s disinterested in getting involved in the fight game again, even as a trainer, but eventually Johnson talks him into it. Rocky recognizes him as Creed’s son but Johnson swears him to secrecy about it because he wants to make it on his own and not with his dad’s name and legend boosting him. Johnson also has a meet-cute with a hot young Black woman neighbor named Bianca (Tessa Thompson), an aspiring singer who’s going deaf (she points out the hearing aids in her ears to Johnson) but is determined to pursue her musical career for as long as she can. Johnson lands his first professional bout in the U.S. when a trainer who’s an old friend of Rocky’s needs an opponent for the fighter he’s promoting as the next light-heavyweight contender, Pete Sporino (Ritchie Coster), whose lithe white body is covered virtually head to toe with tattoos.

Creed easily beats Sporino, and this sets him up for a championship fight with the reigning fighter in his division, “Pretty” Ricky Conlan (Tony Bellew) from Liverpool. (There’s a brief bit of narration about how Liverpool is a rough town and people who grow up there look to their town heroes for inspiration – which had both Charles and I doing double-takes because, let’s face it, the most famous Liverpudlians of all time were The Beatles. Also, both Charles and I had a lot of fun with the fact that this character has the same last name as I do.) Conlan is just emerging from a seven-year prison sentence and he’s already blown his first chance at a comeback fight by cracking the jaw of his opponent at the face-off ceremony, since Conlan couldn’t hold back his temper long enough to wait for the occasion when he was supposed to hit the guy. The film inevitably builds to a climactic fight at the arena in Liverpool, where Conlan and Creed (by now Johnson has been “outed” as Creed’s son after footage of his fight with Sporino went viral over the Internet and mainstream sports media) are scheduled for 12 rounds (midway between a standard 10-round fight and a 15-round championship bout). Conlan is the heavy favorite both among the audience and the professional handicappers, especially since he’s taller than Creed and has longer arms – so, as Rocky explains to both Creed and us, Creed will have to get in under him to land any blows. In the end, just as Balboa did in the original 1975 Rocky, Creed “goes the distance” with Conlan but loses in a split decision – though apparently Coogler (or someone else) shot an alternate ending in which Creed wins, which might have actually made for a better conclusion. (Then again, it might not have, and I wish the makers of this DVD had included both endings on the disc.)

The reason I called Creed a schizoid movie is it’s caught between its place in the Rocky cycle and the deeper, richer work Ryan Coogler might have created if he’d been given his head and hadn’t had to deal with Sylvester Stallone as co-writer, co-producer and co-star. I used to joke about Stallone that he was undoubtedly jealous of his rivals as 1970’s male action stars: Clint Eastwood became an Academy Award-winning director who could make hit movies whether he starred in them or not, and Arnold Schwarzenegger became a two-term governor of California, while Stallone just got mired in action roles whose box-office appeal got smaller as his face got craggier and more, as Douglas Sirk put it about John Wayne, “petrified.” One can sense Ryan Coogler groping towards themes he powerfully realized in Black Panther: the responsibilities one has to one’s ancestors whether one grew up in a “normal” family or not; the burden of heritage and the quest for self-definition; the role of the lone Black hero in a culture determined and largely defined by whites. At the same time Creed misses as much as it hits, though the final fight is brilliantly staged and showcases, as few fight films ever have (1949’s The Set-Up is the exception that proves the rule), the sheer brutality of boxing and the bloodiness (literally as well as figuratively) of the sport.