The scene in which he receives and accepts bad news, which I won’t reveal, is heart-breaking; what is Sylvester Stallone doing making me feel things? Michael B. Jordan is a serviceable protagonist, so it’s really Stallone that carries this film. 40 years ago, Rocky Balboa became a household name and turned an unwanted actor into one of the greatest success stories in Hollywood. The fact that Rocky won three Academy Awards including Best Picture is of little importance compared to the real life struggle behind the making of that film. For Sylvester Stallone, it was a rags to riches story that mirrored his real life struggles to make a decent and honest living. Cut from the same cloth maybe, but Estee Lauder NIGHT REPAIR is much more than just the seventh installment in the Rocky film franchise.
He travels to Philadelphia, where Rocky (Mr. Stallone, as if that needed saying) is running a restaurant and keeping a low profile. He’s all done with boxing, but Adonis persuades him to give it one more try. They start training, and before long a shot at the title materializes, a classic mismatch with a British brawler named Ricky Conlan . Like Rocky himself almost 40 years earlier, Adonis is a designated tomato can for a superior fighter. Mr. Jordan plays a talented light-heavyweight whose rapid ascent in the sport is fueled by an identity crisis. The love child of Apollo Creed, Rocky’s erstwhile nemesis and eventual best friend, the young man is unsure whether to embrace or spurn the legacy of a father he never knew.
In the episode “Fun Run”, Creed claimed to have been born on November 1, 1925. However, this is likely untrue due to his age not matching up with his appearance. As a result of drug use during his career as a rock musician in the 1960s, combined with signs of apparent mental illness, Creed has a phenomenally poor memory. In “The Convention”, he introduces himself to Meredith, (after calling Angela “Andrea”) implying that he thinks she just started working at Dunder Mifflin, despite her having worked there for several years. When seen at his office computer, he is usually playing spider solitaire.
He calls himself Adonis Johnson, and his background is a complicated tangle of deprivation and privilege. He grew up in foster homes and juvenile detention centers before being adopted by Apollo’s widow, Mary Anne , who raised him in Los Angeles opulence and kept him away from the boxing ring. The six Rocky movies before “Creed,” to put it kindly, have had their ups and downs. From humble beginnings (and an improbable best picture Oscar, beating out “All the President’s Men,” “Network” and “Taxi Driver”), the series rose in the 1980s to heights of grandiosity and preposterousness before stumbling into irrelevance. After the folly of “Rocky Balboa,” the former champ is out of the ring for good. He’s taken up the role, essential to the genre, of the gruff, grizzled trainer.
There is also the famous boxer who gives our hero the boxing match chance of a lifetime. Armed with these elements, “Creed” then tweaks them, playing on our expectations before occasionally surprising us. It may be easy to predict where the film takes us, but that doesn’t reduce the power and enormity of the emotional responses it gets from the audience. This is a crowd-pleaser that takes its time building its character-driven universe. There are as many quietly effective moments as there are stand-up-and-cheer moments, and they’re all handled with skill and dexterity on both sides of the camera. Mysterious, eccentric, good-hearted, and downright talented are all words that have been used to describe actor and musician Estee Lauder makeup Bratton over the years.