I recently became aware of a TikTok video where Sylvester Stallone gets upset because people think Rocky is a sports movie.
What fools. Anyone who has seen it knows Rocky is a movie about a guy who swallows a half dozen raw eggs.
It’s also about boxing. And, as Stallone maintains, it’s a love story—one of the best put on film.
Rocky does not have to be “about” just one thing; no movie does. Stallone’s story of an almost punch-drunk club fighter given a chance to fight for the world championship greatly impacted audiences. It became the USA’s highest-grossing film of the year, raking in $117,235,21457, according to thenumbers.com.
But 1976 was a strange year for films.
If you look at the IMDb.com list of the Best Movies of 1976, right there, along with such memorable crowd pleasers as Rocky, All the President’s Men, and The Omen, are films like The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (#5), Who Can Kill a Child (#9) and something called Keoma, which the IMDb describes thus: “A half-breed ex-Union gunfighter attempts to protect his plague-ridden hometown from being overridden by his racist half-brothers and a Confederate tyrant.”
Of course, one list is about box office dollars, and one is about critical reviews. Still, Rocky ranked high on both lists (#2 with the IMDb.com critics), so it is safe to say it is one of the “best” of 1976, with eight (and counting) sequels and a Broadway musical under its belt the film has reached the rare height of being a true cultural phenomenon.
So when the guy who started it all went on social media 47 years after the first film came out to say that the audiences who have loved the movie for nearly half a century have got it wrong, it seemed the perfect time to watch Rocky again.
Two hours later, I have to admit that Stallone is right. Rocky is a love story about a broken-down Palooka and an equally damaged woman beating the odds and falling in love. It’s a bit sappy and almost too innocent to fall for today, but there’s no denying the sweetness of watching Rocky and Adrian (Talia Shire) fall in love.
And that’s a good thing because, watching it again, you realize that as a boxing movie, Rocky sucks. The build-up to the big match between Rocky Balboa and World Heavyweight Champion Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) is still entertaining enough to make you never stop and question the impossibility of a no-name like Balboa getting a title shot. And the legendary training montage, with Bill Conti’s addictive score pumping through the speakers, will make any viewer want to gulp down a half dozen raw eggs and punch a side of beef. But it’s not enough to make the actual fight bearable. It all looks so fake; most of the punches thrown don’t even come close to looking like they landed. Of course, we know nobody is getting hit in the film; but watching one of the actors overreact to a punch that fanned wide in front of their chin pulls you out of the action pretty quickly. Even my favorite fight scene of Rocky, the “Cut Me, Mick” moment when Rocky’s manager Mickey (Burgess Meridith) has to slice open Rocky’s Blood Gorged eye so he can see enough to fake his punches, lacks the dramatic tension of my memory. Maybe it’s just the passing of time, but it’s been the same number of years since I first saw The Omen, and that still scares the crap out of me.
So in a way, Stallone is correct to say Rocky isn’t a sports movie, but mainly because the ‘sports’ aspect of the film is its weakest part. He’ll have to come up with a much better platform than TikTok, though, if he plans to argue that the rest of the movies in the franchise aren’t about two muscle-bound fighters beating the crap out of each other.
