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Rocky Balboa is complete shit

Film // Jim // 2nd February 2007

Heard fairly good (and some very, very scarily enthused) things about this 6th outing for Stallone’s signature franchise. Went over to the showcase cinema in Cov with Gary and Gareth, both big fans of most of the previous instalments.

I’d seen the first one (which is ok) and the fourth one (which is shocking) and wasn’t really sure what to expect. What we got is one of the most dog-shit atrocities ever to be exposed to photosensitive film. That “Faces of Death” snuff video that went round when I was a student was infinitely more worthwhile.

You really have no idea of how horrible this film is, effectively an hour of mawkish sentimental slush followed by a shockingly un-thrilling punch up and then a bit more slush at the end.

I don’t have the words to really convey how poor this is but in the interests of the greater good I’m going to have a quick crack at it, ahem…

The acting is so bad it could probably raise the dead. Chief culprits being the blokes playing Rocky’s son and The (not terribly hard looking) Champ, I’ve seen less wood in a pine-filled woodshed, constructed purely from wood in a particularly dense forest.

Burt Young is the least convincing screen drunk of all time and Stallone is hilariously awful in every single scene. In the boxing scenes he looks like a particularly veiny bit of artexed wall. I believe he may be dyeing his hair but I don’t have forensic evidence. The most convincing performance is probably by the oft-visited grave stone of Rocky’s dead wife; suitably stony and chiselled.

Rocky Balboa: Shit, really shit

As you will know if you have ever spent more than five minutes on this web site I know next to nothing about anything, particularly writing. One thing I do know though is that if I were to eat five cans of alphabetti spaghetti followed by half a bottle of gin, clamber onto the roof of my building and then throw up explosively all over Portland Street, the randomly spewed, half digested letters would very probably have splattered into a more subtle, complex and involving piece of work than the script for this diseased elephant’s cock of a film.

The plot is, lets be kind, FUCKING STUPID to say the least; 60 year old with bad arthritis twats the heavyweight champ about the place while winning the respect of his distant, yuppie son. Still most films with such far-fetched stories are at least mad and entertaining. Rocky Balboa for almost its entire running time is about as mad as doing a bit of knitting while watching Songs of Praise and about as exciting as slippers.

The famous music kicks in at the start and during the deeply homo-erotic training montage: “Push it hard, Rocco!”, “Gruuuunt”, “Push it, push it, let’s build some hurtin’ bombs”, “Grroooaannn”. The rest of the time we get a maudlin piano version that would be more at home on a weepy channel 5 afternoon TV movie about baby koala bears with cancer. It’s enough to make you want to pour hot candle wax into your ears. Utter horse-spunk.

As the titles proudly proclaim this is “a film by Sylvester Stallone” he wrote and directed the whole lot. This is handy as it means all the blame can be laid at one, I imagine, very well presented door.

I’ve heard Stallone is a top bloke and a bit of a laugh but, even after taking that into consideration, I would still have to recommend that if he is ever to venture near a type-writer or computer keyboard again, he should have his hands removed with blunt axes so that the world can never again suffer the likes of:

- The emotional outburst at the boxing license hearing where Rocky just shouts a load of random words at a high volume. I had totally lost the plot at this stage and just giggled a lot.
- The bit at the dog pound that was so painfully done it made me want to eat my own face.
- Jokes that are about as amusing as an infected testicle the first time, then when recycled for a second outing they are about as funny as a racial genocide carried out using nothing but blunt pencils.
- Any of the many speeches about self-respect that sound like a fucking PE teacher going off on one about the evils of masturbation, unsupportive underwear and athletes foot.
- The bit where his son shouts “UNLOAD ON THIS GUY, DAD” and we all laughed far too much.
- All that “getting up after you’ve been knocked down” shite.

Avoid at all costs unless you are a hopeless sado-masochist with a fetish for steroid ridden sexagenarians and deeply awkward melancholy drama involving gravestones.

The fact that this film seems to be fairly well received and through some demonic/financial has a score of 7.6/10 on the IMDB proves as I have suspected for some time that the world is full of total fucking idiots. Although, being fair, it is still about a million times better than Revolver.

Links, that I wouldn't bother with if I was you

Rocky Balboa IMDB page

Why do you care?

Stallone at wikipedia

Oooh, he's been in some shocking films