Creed surprises but doesn’t quite go the distance

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Nearly four decades ago, Rocky, an underdog box-office hit about an underdog boxer, did what underdogs do: It stole a big prize from worthy contenders, in this case the Best Picture Oscar that could have gone instead to Taxi Driver or Network or All the President’s Men. Each of those films was, and remains, better than the shamelessly cloying movie that made a star out of Sylvester Stallone and launched sequels of increasingly diminished returns.

Still, that first Rocky retains a timeless charm. Its hook may be hokum — a fighter who wouldn’t hurt a fly — but, at least at the saga’s outset, it’s a sincere hokum. The hero’s best friends are his turtles. As written and played by Stallone, the 1976-model Rocky Balboa is an adorable lug, impossible to root against. It’s the Rocky of the Reagan years and after that tests the patience. Shouldn’t six follow-up chapters be more than enough?

Now there’s a seventh, kind of — for the first time, Stallone has neither written nor directed a Rocky-related movie, trusting instead Ryan Coogler, who made Fruitvale Station. It’s called Creed, and it’s supposed to be mostly about the illegitimate son of Rocky’s old nemesis turned friend. Based on Muhammad Ali, Apollo Creed was Rocky’s inverse: brash, assured, successful. Unlike Ali and Rocky, however, he’s dead, taken out by the bad guy in Rocky IV. Almost 30 years later, the son, called Adonis, is ready to emerge from his father’s shadow. Naturally, he’s a boxer. Naturally, he will need Rocky’s help.

Adonis is a born fighter but, as played by Michael B. Jordan — who starred for Coogler in Fruitvale Station — he’s also levelheaded, handsome, educated and charismatic. Thanks to Apollo’s widow, who adopted him after his mother died, he’s also wealthy and doesn’t need boxing to support himself. In Coogler and co-writer Aaron Covington’s screenplay, in fact, Adonis doesn’t seem especially haunted by his father’s absence. The central conflict revolves instead around his quest to outrun his lineage. Near the end, he receives a gift from his foster mom. The card reads, “Build your own legacy,” and it accompanies his father’s boxing shorts, adorned with Adonis’ birth surname as well as with his famous dad’s.

That kind of confused message infects Creed, in which the tone veers from goopy melodrama to scatological slapstick and back again. Coogler inverts the original movie’s ramshackle innocence by emphasizing his hero’s desire to distance himself from privilege. But young Adonis is too ambitious to get very far in that quest, and not much about his slumming-it milieu is really very hardscrabble. His love interest is improbably talented and gorgeous, and the kids in this movie’s version of inner city Philly roll on dirt bikes and ATVs.

Stallone, however, recovers his inner palooka, and he does the seemingly impossible: He makes Rocky a refreshing, humbly goofy presence again.

Coogler’s movie comes to raucous life during its fights. Maryse Alberti’s camera flows around the ring, moving behind the puncher’s shoulder as though following a conversation. There isn’t much new about how these sequences are staged, but they’re fluid and involving — slick in a way that the original Rocky was not. Slick, in fact, in a way that’s easy to recognize in another sequel-intensive genre: If Creed is a reboot, it’s one that’s fit for the comic-book-superhero age.