Rocky Balboa has won ten title defenses by the time Rocky III opens, and that is the problem. Sylvester Stallone wrote, directed and stars in the 1982 film, the third entry in the Rocky franchise and the sequel to Rocky II. The movie is a sports drama with action sequences, and it runs 100 minutes. It is also, for most of its first half, a story about a champion who has been protected from the truth. That idea is strong. The execution is not.
Rocky III scores 5.7 of 10.
Trailer, via Amazon MGM Studios.
A Statue, a Challenger, and a Stacked Record
The film sets itself in 1981, five years after Rocky beat Apollo Creed for the heavyweight championship. Rocky’s fame, wealth and celebrity profile have all grown. He has defended the belt ten times. His manager, Mickey Goldmill, played by Burgess Meredith, watches a young contender climb the rankings and does not like what he sees. That contender is James “Clubber” Lang, played by Mr. T.
At the unveiling of a statue of himself by the stairway at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Rocky starts to announce his retirement. Lang cuts him off. Now the number-one contender, Lang challenges him in public and accuses Rocky of handpicking lesser opponents. Rocky takes the fight.
Mickey does not want it. Pressed, he admits he chose Rocky’s opponents himself, to spare his fighter another beating like the one Apollo gave him in their rematch. Lang is young, powerful and “hungry,” Mickey says. Rocky, by contrast, is “civilized” and no longer has the stamina and strength for a boxer of Lang’s caliber.
That confession is the best scene in the picture. It turns ten title defenses into a lie, and it turns Mickey from a trainer into a man who has been managing his friend’s decline in secret. Rocky is shattered by it. He still talks Mickey into one more bout.
The Training That Explains Everything
Rocky promises Mickey he will “live in the gym.” He does not. He trains in a crowded hotel ballroom, with the public watching and distractions everywhere. Lang trains alone, with ruthless determination and vigor. The film cuts between the two, and the point lands without a word of narration.
This is where Rocky III is most sure of itself. The contrast is not subtle and does not need to be. A champion who has become an event is preparing in front of an audience. A challenger with nothing is preparing in a room by himself.
Lang’s backstory, as the film gives it, is not complicated. He was orphaned young and spent most of his childhood on the streets of Chicago’s South Side, in orphanages and juvenile facilities. As an adult he served five years in prison for one count of felony assault. He found boxing there. It was a way to let out his frustration.
The fight is set at Philadelphia’s Spectrum on August 15, 1981. Backstage, Lang shoves Mickey violently. Mickey suffers a heart attack, tied to an underlying heart condition the film had already shown during Rocky’s charity fight with the wrestler Thunderlips. Mickey dies. Rocky loses the title.
Mr. T, Cast After Two Boxers Said No
The casting story behind Clubber Lang is more interesting than most of what made it to the screen. Two world-class heavyweights, Joe Frazier and Earnie Shavers, were considered first. Both matched Stallone in height and physique. Both were rejected over vocal concerns. Frazier reportedly had a stutter, and Shavers had a high-pitched voice that was deemed unsuitable for the character’s menacing persona.
Casting director Rhonda Young found Mr. T on NBC’s Games People Play, in an episode built around a competition called “America’s Toughest Bouncer.” She contacted producer Don Ohlmeyer about “the man with the mohawk.” Mr. T was cast, and screen tests secured the role. It became his breakthrough in film.
That is a genuine piece of luck for the franchise. Mr. T does not play Lang as a villain with a plan. He plays him as a force, and the performance works because the film never asks him to be anything else. Lang is the wall Rocky has to hit.
The rest of the cast returns. Talia Shire is Adrian, Rocky’s wife. Burt Young is Paulie, his friend, brother-in-law and cornerman. Carl Weathers is Apollo Creed, the former heavyweight champion and Rocky’s old rival, who agrees to train him after Mickey dies. Tony Burton is Tony “Duke” Evers, Apollo’s father figure, friend, trainer and manager, who helps with the training. Hulk Hogan plays Thunderlips. Ina Fried plays Robert “Rocky” Balboa Jr., Rocky and Adrian’s only child.
Apollo Creed Takes Over the Corner
The second half of Rocky III belongs to Apollo. The man who beat Rocky and then lost to him becomes his trainer, and the film treats the arrangement as the natural end of their rivalry. Weathers plays it with a looseness the movie badly needs. Where Mickey was worry and guilt, Apollo is work.
The film also makes the two men close friends by the end, which is a bigger swing than it sounds. Rocky III is asking the audience to accept that the series’ original antagonist is now the person who restores its hero. It mostly earns that.
What it does not earn is the speed of the recovery. Rocky goes from a broken fighter who lost his trainer and his belt to a contender again, and the film moves through the work in montage. That is a genre convention, not a flaw by itself. The flaw is that the movie has nothing else to say in the stretch. The first half is about a lie. The second half is about a workout.
The Music and the Fights Hold Up
Where Rocky III still delivers is in its action sequences and its music, which drew praise even from critics who disliked the screenplay. The fight choreography is staged for impact rather than realism, and the final rematch between Rocky and Lang is built to pay off the training scenes rather than to surprise anyone.
The film was released in the United States on May 28, 1982, by MGM/UA Entertainment Co. It was the first film in the franchise not solely distributed by United Artists, after that company’s 1981 merger with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It grossed $270 million worldwide, more than its predecessor.
That number is the clearest evidence of what the franchise had become by 1982. Rocky III is not a small movie about a fighter from Philadelphia anymore. It is an event, and it was sold like one.
The tagline was “The greatest challenge.”
What the Film Gets Wrong
The screenplay is the weak point, and it is weak in a specific way. Rocky III keeps telling the audience that Lang is dangerous and then gives him almost nothing to do except be large and loud. The most menacing thing he does in the entire film is shove an old man backstage, and that is a plot device, not a character.
The film does establish that the public dislikes and disrespects Lang as champion, and that this is what leads to the rematch. What it does not do is dramatize the turn. The resentment simply arrives.
The Thunderlips sequence, a charity exhibition against a professional wrestler, sits in the movie like a piece from a different film. It exists to establish Mickey’s heart condition, which is real work. It also stops the story cold for several minutes to do it.
Three things sink the back half:
- Lang gets no scene that shows why he is feared beyond his size
- The public’s turn against him as champion is stated rather than shown
- The rematch is decided by training montage rather than by anything Rocky learns
Where Rocky III Sits in the Franchise
Development began soon after Rocky II came out. Stallone went on a strict diet and workout regimen to prepare. The original cast came back quickly. Casting Lang was the hard part, and the film’s solution, a television personality with no acting history, turned out to be the most durable thing about it.
Retrospective reviews of Rocky III have been warmer than the ones it got in 1982, and it has a strong cult following. That split makes sense. The movie is a better memory than it is a watch. The image of Rocky and Apollo in the ring together, the statue on the museum steps, Mr. T at his most imposing — those are the parts that stayed.
The parts that did not stay are the ones the film needed most. Mickey’s confession is a real idea about what success does to a fighter, and Rocky III raises it and then drops it. The movie never returns to the question of whether Rocky deserved those ten defenses. It just puts him back in the ring and lets him win.
That is the trade Rocky III makes. It gives up the most interesting thing it has for a cleaner ending. The result is a film that is remembered fondly, quoted often and, watched start to finish, thinner than its reputation.
It is not a bad movie. It is a movie with one great scene, one great performance from Mr. T, a score that carries the rest, and a script that runs out of ideas at the halfway mark.
5.7 of 10.
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