There’s a tension in the Rocky series between two largely incompatible conceits: Rocky Balboa as the shy, humble, gentleman brawler from working-class Philly or Rocky Balboa as the cartoon avatar of America’s can-do spirit, intrepidly grinding through title matches against stronger, faster, more colorful opponents. The first type won a best picture Oscar for its young writer/star, Sylvester Stallone, who, in classic underdog fashion, was wildly overmatched against All the President’s Men, Bound for Glory, Network, and Taxi Driver. The second type dominated the next decade in ever-more garish and cynical vehicles, none dumber than Rocky IV, which pitted The Italian Stallion against Ivan Drago, a dead-eyed, machine-tooled robot of the Soviet empire.
Now that Creed and its sequel have brought the vintage Rocky back — and, in Creed II, the surprisingly affecting return of Dolph Lundgren as Drago — Stallone has retooled Rocky IV to seem more like the original Rocky, at least insofar as such a feat is possible. His new Rocky IV: Rocky Vs. Drago is only a few minutes longer than the original cut, but there’s a significant amount of tinkering in this version, particularly toward the beginning, that’s intended to add depth to Rocky’s relationships to his friend and rival Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) and his wife Adrian (Talia Shire), and remove some of the sillier touches, most notably the infamous robot given to his brother-in-law, Paulie (Burt Young), as a birthday gift.
Erasing Paulie’s robot from history will surely be chilling to fans, who understood the robot as a sassy symbol of the wealth that had softened Rocky’s once-gritty palooka. Stallone also tosses the Balboa-Creed sparring match that opened the original Rocky IV and replaces it, curiously, with seven minutes of material from Rocky III that underscore their bond. Since Creed will not survive his exhibition match against Drago, Stallone seems intent on drawing out their scenes together as much as possible, hitting hard on the theme of aging warriors doing what’s in their nature, even if others have trouble understanding why they want to step back into the arena.
But let’s be clear: this is a ridiculous undertaking, a polish on a Cold War relic. For example, Stallone does not cut the sequence where Balboa speeds off into the night in his Lamborghini to Robert Tepper’s No Easy Way Out while flashing back to scenes from the first three Rocky movies. He merely attempts to add gravitas by converting those flashbacks from color to black-and-white. (Fans needn’t worry about the other montage sequences, though: Unlike Paulie’s robot, the two back-to-back training montages for the Drago fight are sacrosanct.)
In any form, Rocky IV remains a goofy, threadbare fantasy of Reagan-era bootstrap-ism and political saber-rattling, with every mighty Rocky punch landing like a sledgehammer to the Berlin Wall. The film has always been a less-fun recycling of the entertainingly tacky Rocky III, starting with Creed’s death in the ring against Drago in Las Vegas, which is so immensely unsettling that it throws the story off-balance, rendering Rocky’s redemption efforts hollow. (It was worse at the time, only three years removed from the bout where the South Korean challenger Duk Koo Kim collapsed and later died after getting knocked out by lightweight champion Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini.)
Rocky vs Drago succeeds to the tiniest degree in making the film feels like some semblance of a character study, rather than a rushed 90 minutes full of repurposed footage and fighting montages set to workout music by Survivor, John Cafferty, Touch, and composer Vince DiCola. The fighting sequences in the Rocky movies have always been a dream of what boxing might be like if it were more like a choreographed street brawl than a sport where defense is an option. Rocky’s strategy of waddling toward his opponent with his gloves down is like if Muhammad Ali’s rope-a-dope strategy involved exhausting a rival by having him punch you repeatedly in the face.
All the Rocky movies are about overcoming odds through grit and determination, and they’re all seductive for that reason, especially when the odds are as great as Rocky fighting a machine-tooled Russian who’s a full foot taller and possessed of a lethal right hand. But even Stallone at the time seemed to realize that he’d exhausted the formula, and he handed over the reins to Rocky V to John G. Avildsen, who directed the original film, in an effort to rediscover the character’s lost soul. It didn’t work then for Rocky V. And it doesn’t work now for the unsalvageable Rocky IV.
