VHS Revival goes twelve rounds with Sylvester Stallone’s MTV-styled propaganda vehicle
The appeal of Rocky Balboa is his relatable status as a flawed everyman. In 1976, director John G. Avildsen gave us the perfect underdog story. Backed by an Oscar-nominated screenplay by Stallone himself and managing a further seven nominations and three wins, Rocky was about realising potential and overcoming the odds, shining a raw yet enchanting light on the downtrodden working classes of a post-industrial Philadelphia. Post World War II, the Great Migration would lead to a housing shortage and a multicultural stew of immigrants that saw middle-class white Americans flee the area. Rocky was the personification of a generation born into poverty and degradation. Nobody expected the likes of Balboa to prosper, modernisation leaving many unskilled and unemployable.
It was from the industrial ashes that one of cinema’s most cherished legacies would triumphantly emerge. Rocky showed us the importance of attitude and determination and the will to succeed despite all obstacles ― not just those imposed by outside forces, but those imposed on oneself as a consequence. It also spoke to family values and the importance of togetherness, a society of shared desperation coming together through the success of one of their own. Stallone was a revelation as the movie’s titular hero, a reluctant thug-for-high whose friendship with an insular store clerk set him on the path to self-discovery. The young actor was so adamant about starring as the eponymous pugilist that he’d turn down cold, hard cash from interested financiers while he and his pregnant wife struggled to make ends-meet. ‘Sly’ would go on to have an incredible mainstream career, battling the mighty Arnold Schwarzenegger toe-to-toe for the best part of two decades, but the foundations were hand-built and steeped in humility.
Rocky was nothing short of magic, and the inevitable sequel would follow. The original movie was smart enough to realise that a Rocky title win against world champion Apollo Creed was just a smidgen too far, detracting from the Balboa character and the film’s romance narrative with an ever-supportive Adrian (Talia Shire), who would prove the Italian Stallion’s greatest achievement. But this was Hollywood, Stallone was Stallone, and there was a primal urge, however nonsensical from an artistic standpoint, to see our humble warrior triumph in the ring over and over; not for the sake of love or humility or hope or any of those elements that makes Rocky such a timeless slice of cinema, but just to see him kick somebody’s ass and lift the gold, and with the bigger-is-better 80s fast approaching, there was no better time to fulfil those urges.
Rocky would get his title win, and a second sequel would soon materialise, flavour of the month celebrities such as A-Team favourite Mr. T and World Wrestling Federation champion Hulk Hogan adding to an increasingly gimmicky roster of stars. Ironically, whenever attendance is down in the world of professional wrestling, promoters invariably turn to xenophobia to pique the waning interest of bloodthirsty fans. Whether it’s the Russians, the Sheiks or even the French Canadians, America vs the world is a sure-fire way to appeal to the lowest common denominator. As with Stallone’s other big franchise Rambo, the Rocky series would begin with authentic intentions before descending into the glitzy realms of crowd-pleasing hokum, and going off the commercial clout of those sequels, peaking at a whopping $300,400,000 in 1985, it was the right decision from a financial perspective.
Going in one more round when you don’t think you can – that’s what makes all the difference in your life.
Rocky Balboa
And so we come to Rocky IV, which takes this tried-and-tested formula and showers it in a red, white and blue blizzard of Hollywood stardust. As an exercise in filmmaking, Stallone’s fourth outing as Balboa is trite and predictable and grossly formulaic, but as a time capsule into the neon hedonism of the Reagan 80s, there are perhaps none more pertinent. Stallone has admitted to being at war with his own ego during that time, and the movie plays out like some kind of facile onscreen redemption. Overwhelmed by material goods and taking his eye off the prize, our once-humble hero has even begun to neglect his family for the ever-burning spotlight of mainstream adulation. Written and directed by the man himself, this is Stallone at his most extravagantly supercilious, but also his most self-critical.
To be fair, it was an interesting premise for a character of Rocky’s cinematic lineage. How many great sports talents have found fame and fortune and gone off the rails? It doesn’t happen nearly as much as it used to — the godlike hand of corporate sponsorship sees to that — but it’s a believable narrative for a humble kid who once had nothing and immediately has it all handed to him and then some. The movie’s ostentatious presentation kills any hope for genuine catharsis, franchise staples such as Rocky’s battered, post-bout speech and Adrian’s teary-eyed emergence from the bloodstained rafters beginning to pang of self-parody, with a plot that often seems to stumble through the motions. Based on these elements alone, Rocky IV is one uppercut away from franchise extinction.
Of course, all of that pales to the quite outrageous Cold War propaganda that punctuates affairs. Rocky IV is not a movie renown for its subtleties. In fact, it’s the most blatant exercise in nationalistic stereotyping this side of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, one crammed with enough pop culture showmanship to justify its spuriously fascist tone. Here, Soviets are heartless hunks of steel beset on smashing the American Dream. They are cheats, liars and murderers, and all in the name of Communism. Opponent Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) is a man-mountain with a buzzed blonde mane and icy glare; a poster boy for ethnic cleansing who sets out to crush American showmanship and anything else tied to Old Glory. As a sheer physical presence Drago is a monster, a flesh sickle with a ruthless edge who’s delineated like an undercooked video game villain.
Rocky IV wastes no time communicating its political views, the kind that pang of an actor who sleeps on a bed of money. One of the first images we see are two flag-painted gloves clashing with a cartoon explosion that sets the decadent tone from the off, the film’s theme song drawing the battle lines so brazenly it makes you realise how far we’ve come in the three decades since its release. I’m not advocating communism, or any ideology for that matter, but the way Rocky IV portrays political conflict and the possibility of resolution is gobsmackingly schematic, so condescending it threatens to cross over into spoof territory.
Draped in the Star-Spangled Banner, Balboa is the personification of American exceptionalism, a beacon of freedom and democracy who not only topples the cheating Soviet giant, but also manages to turn a nation of indoctrinated communists into on-the-spot capitalists, a previously robotic rabble who rise to their feet on home turf and chant Balboa’s name, applauding the bravery of the foreign entity who was able to solve their decades-long moral crisis with 12 rounds of fisticuffs. Even ‘Soviet Leader’ David Lloyd Austin, a transparent Gorbachev lookalike who has presided over events like an immovable tank of systematic oppression, rises to his feet as head cheerleader. It’s nothing short of surreal at times.
By this rationale, all of the world’s conflicts can be put to rest by the actions of a millionaire superstar, and though that idea has become somewhat prevalent in an era of reality TV and celebrity culture, this one is best consumed with a hefty pinch of the proverbial salt. Balboa may be promoting unity, his fictional excesses half-heartedly warning of the entrapments of consumerism, but the movie’s overall presentation promotes the capitalist ideology with a hedonistic ferocity that never stops to take a breath. It’s such an audacious contradiction in terms. Fittingly, Austin would later play the same unnamed Gorbachev character in the glorious, Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker spoof The Naked Gun, which should give you an idea of exactly what we’re dealing with here.
Whoa! Violent? Hey, we don’t keep our people behind a wall with machine guns.
Paulie
The movie’s central conflict hinges on an astonishingly manipulative revenge fantasy involving one-time Rocky rival and best friend Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers). Creed is well into retirement when he takes offence to the emotionless Russian ploughing his way through the heavyweight division. After some spurious dialogue about jeopardised freedoms he is decked out in Yankee attire and back in the ring, only for a steroid-pumped Drago to leave him fatally twitching on the canvas. Watching on with inhuman pride are his dastardly entourage, leggy wife and real-life Stallone squeeze Ludmilla (Brigitte Nielsen) shaking the hand of Mrs. Creed before basking in her husband’s death and grinning with the kind of super villainy that stops the movie from becoming truly offensive. The fact that Weathers and Lundgren had some real-life heat, the former threatening to quit over the newcomer’s heavy-handedness in the ring, only adds to what is an admittedly powerful scene and Dolph’s authenticity as a stone cold killer. I was absolutely terrified of Drago as a watching tyke. He was evil personified.
Rocky IV‘s in-ring legitimacy doesn’t stop there. In fact, much of what transpires between the ropes is believable and gripping, providing a much welcome antithesis to the movie’s mostly stylised fantasy. Stallone has gone on record as saying that the film’s fictional sparring was for the most part genuine, he and Lundgren duking it out with realism in mind. Lundgren, who Stallone believed had what it takes to become a genuine heavyweight champion, would connect with such force in one scene that Sly was taken to hospital with a swollen heart after his breastbone slammed dangerously against it. From there Stallone was rushed to an intensive care unit where he remained for eight days with off-the-chart blood pressure of up to 200. It was touch and go for a while. Rocky IV was also one of the few sports movies that used actual sound effects from no-fooling punches, as well as genuine training methods from top boxing coaches, an injection of well-needed earnest amid the unreserved pageantry. Whatever you may think of Stallone’s hedonistic 80s period, a time when he ditched all notions of serious acting for musclebound blockbuster exploits, it’s difficult to question his commitment.
Drago’s unforgivable act leads a vengeful Rocky to tape up his fists and fight the Soviet brute on foreign soil, a place where the Stasi secret police spy on his every move and 90 percent of the population carry rifles and dress in army uniforms. In a quite improbable role reversal, communist champion Drago uses modern, high-tech equipment to train for the big fight, legitimate apparatus that was actually two decades from public use, while capitalist millionaire Rocky goes back to his roots by braving the snow and humping logs around in sub-zero temperatures. He even manages to top an icy mountain as big as Everest in nothing but a pair of sneakers, echoing the famous Philadelphia step run with the kind of excessive grandeur that typifies the movie, and much of the era. A beefed-up buffet of slick MTV editing and sweat-dripping slo-mo, the whole ordeal is scored to John Cafferty’s irresistibly excessive power surge ‘Hearts On Fire’, a glorious experience to behold for fans of 80s kitsch. I much prefer the humble, earnest drama of the first two films, but Rocky IV is a shallow beast of its own making.
If he dies, he dies.
Ivan Drago
Such hyperbolic instances lend Rocky IV a spuriously seductive charm. Despite its paper-thin politics, the movie has so much more to offer. Stallone’s stylistic splurge is a wonderful porthole into the adopted trends of mainstream cinema at a time when a new wave of ‘dance films’ had ditched original, content-specific musical numbers for a plethora of outsourced pop hits and MTV aesthetics, forging a short-lived hybrid of mediums that wowed a generation. So commercially intertwined were the two that if you were a pop musician craving a hit single in the mid-late 80s, you pretty much had to find your way onto a movie soundtrack. Pop music/movie tie-ins almost single-handedly put an end to the second British invasion led by new wave bands such as Duran Duran, who themselves took the soundtrack route with the 1985, Bernard Edwards produced James Bond theme A View to a Kill.
Ultimately, it worked both ways, particularly in Rocky IV, which steered such a shallow formula to the shores of feature-length cinema. One of a series of films to adopt the contrived presentation of the 80s pop music video, a trend that began with the Oscar-winning Flashdance and included such high-octane classics as Tony Scott’s cult jet-burner Top Gun, almost every scene in Rocky IV is saturated with the slick and seamless MTV formula. The movie’s entire second act resembles an extended music video that recaps past events from the stylised perspective of a brooding Balboa, who handles personal conflict the way Lionel Richie handles love songs, drenched in metaphorical shadows and cruising the city streets as the world’s real problems flash by in a neon Neverland.
It’s the film’s pop video presentation that lifts Rocky IV from political drudgery to the heady realms of mindless escapism like a world heavyweight champion raised high on the shoulders of giants, and you have to think that on some level the infamous training montage, while a product of the self-obsessed fitness culture of the time, was a thinly-veiled dig at real-life commercial adversary Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was already threatening to usurp Stallone as Hollywood’s leading action star by the late 1980s. In a 2013 interview with David Letterman, the actor admitted to once harbouring a “violent hatred” towards Arnie. The only thing missing from Sly’s cinematic wet dream is a Soviet-garbed Schwarzenegger standing in the opposite corner of the ring.
As well as its pop music extravagances, Rocky IV benefits from a quite incredible score by future Transformers: The Movie alumni Vince Dicola, who pumps star-spangled adrenaline directly into the movie’s veins. Original Rocky composer Bill Conti would reject the chance to return for the third sequel, choosing instead to work with original director John G. Avildsen on a similarly touching underdog story by the name of The Karate Kid. That film would become one of the summer’s surprise hits, earning the late Pat Morita an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and becoming the top rental of 1986, even beating Rocky IV to the home video punch. As much of a loss as Conti must have been, it’s unlikely he would have been able to produce something so aptly hedonistic. DiCola’s synth-infused score is the lifeblood of this movie, from a sublimely tweaked, jazzed-up version of the original theme to the gloriously fist-pumping War, Rocky IV‘s slab of audio patriotism is an absolute knock-out. Interestingly, Peter Cetera’s hit single Glory of Love was originally penned for Rocky IV but ditched by United Artists, the song eventually picked up by Columbia Pictures for use in The Karate Kid Part II the following year.
During this fight, I’ve seen a lot of changing, in the way you feel about me, and in the way I feel about you. In here, there were two guys killing each other, but I guess that’s better than twenty million. I guess what I’m trying to say, is that if I can change, and you can change, everybody can change!
Rocky Balboa
There are many spurious sentiments to chew on here, so keep a bloodied spit bucket close at hand, but despite everything Rocky IV is actually a very accomplished movie. As a genuine contender to the Rocky title it falls drastically short, doing its best to put the Balboa character down for a 10 count when it comes to serious drama, but the sobering 70s had long-since given way to the gimmicky 80s, and Stallone has always been ahead of the game in his understanding of what the American public wants. As an enduring love story with authentic sentiments Rocky reigns supreme, but as a slice of mindless entertainment the fourth instalment in the seemingly tireless series is as slick as they come. There’s also some fine acting talent on display, the utterly endearing Talia Shire lighting up every frame as the ever-dependable and effortlessly earnest Adrian, the Balboas’ struggles with fame and fortune plausible and relatable despite the film’s presentation. Burt Young’s eternal curmudgeon, Paulie, is also as endearing as ever, offering the movie a much needed blast of authenticity in a world of cardboard caricatures and contrived morality plays, particularly as the sober yin to the infamous ‘Happy Birthday Paulie’ robot’s wildly excessive yang. I realise cocaine was rife in Hollywood during the 1980s, but what on Earth were they thinking?!
Where Rocky IV truly excels is in its ability to appeal to the nostalgic sentiments of a generation. Now that the political dust has settled, we’re able to digest the movie’s derogatory embellishments with a wry smile. Not only that, we can enjoy the film for what it is: a mindless slice of glitzy entertainment that wows as a pop culture vehicle, giving us kitsch robots, gaudy power ballads, a louder than ever James Brown, and the worst political lookalike to ever find employment outside of a Frankie Goes to Hollywood video. Yes, Rocky IV is a twitching bicep of political flexing, but as a time capsule for period excess it’s really quite special, proving an unlikely landmark in 80s cinema and achieving the kind of cult status that most movies can only dream of.
Director: Sylvester Stallone
Screenplay: Sylvester Stallone
Music: Vince DiCola
Cinematography: Bill Butler
Editing: Don Zimmerman &
John W. Wheeler
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