Rocky II

Rocky II steers corrective, immediately re-telling and re-contextualising the climactic moments of the first film with the obvious benefit of a weightier approach to sound design. The fifteen round war that concluded John G Avildsen's Rocky was unusual in terms of how it described impacts: while we were privy to the exchange of in-ring grunts and whispers, the clubbing sound of fists colliding with flesh was so absent that, as a viewer, you weren't always sure if either man was actually being struck. The welts that had swollen Rocky's eyes shut told their own story but the lack of thwacks - not to mention the stage strikes that often very obviously failed to connect and a style of boxing from the Philadelphia native that completely elided any sort of defensive posture - left the concluding boxing match feeling strangely perfunctory, and even a little bit ridiculous. Writer-director Sylvester Stallone uses this sequel then as a way to race back to that moment; restaging the same conclusion in such a way that he can finally be happy with both the telling and the outcome. 

In fairness, Rocky II's centrepiece boxing match is a more engaging revision of the same basic premise. Where Avildsen's film opted for an observational stance on the two pugilists, Stallone places the viewer inside both boxer's heads. We see through their eyes: Rocky's cloudy point-of-view as he gazes out on bloodthirsty fans, his periphery struggling to focus thanks to an injured eye. The perspective of Carl Weathers' Creed is likewise swamped by his bruised and bloody opponent. Stallone's artfully distressed mug bobs raggedly, inches from Apollo's face. The language of Rocky II's fight does not ape the once-removed quality of a television broadcast, instead we have slow motion shock and angles that evoke a debilitating, cranial trauma. It's a style of communication designed solely to appraise the scale of Rocky's (eventual) victory and, in that respect, it works wonderfully. Unfortunately this aggressive sort of shorthand extends to the ways in which the rest of the film is structured and written. Rather than examine the next step for this flawed hero, Stallone feels obliged to tear all the goodwill down - in increasingly strained and unconvincing ways - as a route to returning his Rocky to same starting point as before. Talia Shire's Adrian suffers terribly under this new direction, reduced from a person who completes and compliments her partner to a horizontal fulcrum deployed to leverage a crass kind of sentimentality that actually ends up making the Balboa family seem emotionally alien.