‘Rocky Balboa’ Gave Rocky the Sendoff He Deserved

Sometimes, veteran bands will release a self-titled album in the middle of their career. By that point, these groups have firmly established themselves in the popular imagination, but they’re wanting to reintroduce themselves — or signal a return to the basics. Mötley Crüe was the only album the L.A. hard-rock quartet made without their iconic frontman Vince Neil. Blink-182 ushered a move into a more mature direction for the bratty pop-punk stalwarts. Metallica stripped away the group’s excesses, focusing instead on streamlined, hook-heavy radio rock. Whatever their reason for doing it, these bands demanded you take notice: This time, things were going to be different.

From 1976 to 1990, there were five Rocky movies. For the next 15 years, there were none. This was not from lack of trying on Sylvester Stallone’s part. Reminiscing in 2022 about the sixth installment of the franchise, which came out over Christmas of 2006, the writer-director-star declared in an Instagram post, “It was the toughest challenge I ever had. Took over 12 years to make happen. No one wanted to make it. Absolutely no one. It was considered a joke.” But when that film finally arrived, Stallone broke with tradition and didn’t call it Rocky VI. Much like those established groups going with an eponymous album title, Stallone seemed to be alerting us to the fact that this sequel wasn’t exactly business as usual. Say hello to Rocky Balboa.

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Famously, the first Rocky was a labor of love, the product of a young actor named Sylvester Stallone who tried to drum up interest in his script about a never-was Philly boxer. Winning the Oscar for Best Picture, with Stallone nominated for Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay, the 1976 film had a plotline that echoed its creator’s up-from-the-bottom inspirational story. In the process, Stallone became a star, soon writing and directing a series of sequels while simultaneously launching another franchise — this one about a tormented Vietnam vet who works through his trauma by killing bad guys in foreign lands. Just as Rocky had come from nothing to win the title, so too did underdog Stallone emerge as one of the 1980s’ action heavyweights.

But by Rocky V, that ascension had ended. The ‘90s weren’t a particularly successful decade for Stallone. Forget the critics, who were always fairly cool to him: Audiences were starting to tune out as well, largely rejecting junk such as The Specialist and Assassins. And Rocky V, although commercially successful and helmed by original Rocky director John G. Avildsen, seemed like an anticlimactic finale to the franchise. The movie was meant to be a kind of reset, with Rocky (Stallone) and Adrian (Talia Shire) realizing their fortune has vanished thanks to their accountant’s poor investment decisions. But rather than feeling like a return to the character’s, and the franchise’s, modest roots, Rocky V was tired and uninspired.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Stallone hated the film, too. “I really wasn’t satisfied,” he said later. “I feel I let a lot of people down with Rocky V.” And as Stallone’s career continued to decline in the early 2000s, he began to think about Rocky — his creation that once mirrored his own youthful, determined spirit — and wondered if there were still parallels between himself and the character. To paraphrase Rocky IV’s most cheesy/amazing line, if he had changed, maybe Rocky could change too.

“I think that only happens because of a lot of time passed, different marriages, had kids, had problems with kids,” Stallone said about drawing from his personal life when considering who Rocky Balboa would be at 60. There was plenty of material for the writer-director to mine. Stallone had been married twice, briefly engaged to another woman, and was now married again. He’d been a tabloid fixture and also a bit of a punchline, never taken that seriously as an actor or filmmaker. In that same interview, he reflected, “[O]ne thing I realized: The older I get, the more difficult life becomes. It’s not easier, it’s more difficult. … How do you cope with that last third of your life? So Rocky says, ‘I just want to replace old pain with new pain.’ It’s always pain, you’re never free of it.”

Pain, both physical and emotional, had always been part of the Rocky story. Each movie, in its own way, is about the Italian Stallion pushing his body and soul to the limit in order to prove himself worthy to defeat both the boxer in front of him and the anguish within himself. And as the series went on, Rocky’s pummeled body began to betray him, a stark metaphor for encroaching mortality. Which might explain why Rocky Balboa, although not a great film, is a deeply moving one. It chronicles a man whose best days are behind him. He’s not happy with how his life has turned out — he doesn’t want to be champ again, but he wants to reconnect with the person he once was. It’s a story about Rocky Balboa as much as it’s a story about Sylvester Stallone’s relationship to Rocky. 

Before the inevitable big fight at the end, however, Rocky Balboa doesn’t feel much like a Rocky movie. Really, it’s a character piece — and a study of grief. Having lost his beloved Adrian to cancer, Rocky now runs an Italian restaurant named after her, mostly filling his days looking after the place and hobnobbing with the customers, telling them anecdotes from his time in the ring. Although he’s still a hulking presence, Rocky seems smaller, sadder. His grown son Robert (Milo Ventimiglia) has some white-collar job and doesn’t have much time for his old man. He’s still got good ol’ Paulie (Burt Young) to reminisce with, but even Paulie’s getting tired of being around Rocky, who’s in a rut and can’t move on without his wife.  

But a little bit of light comes into Rocky’s world in two ways. First, he runs into Marie (Geraldine Hughes), who he knew when she was a kid decades ago. Now a kindly but struggling single working-class mom, Marie seems to spark something in him: It’s not quite romantic feelings, but it is tender and paternal. Maybe it’s because she’s a faint connection to his past — maybe it’s because he wants to be useful to someone — but he soon gives her a job at the restaurant. And then, he’s courted by promoters handling Mason Dixon (Antonio Tarver), the current heavyweight champ. A computer simulation paired the two boxers up, predicting that Rocky would win, which only underlines Mason’s critics’ suspicions that he isn’t that formidable of a fighter. Mason’s team proposes to Rocky an exhibition fight in Vegas, with the proceeds going to charity. They’ll make sure Rocky doesn’t get hurt too badly, and it will give their guy a chance to demonstrate he’s a legitimate champ — even if he’s boxing a sexagenarian. With little else in his life, Rocky jumps at the offer. 

Like a lot of the later Rocky pictures, Rocky Balboa can be clumsily plotted and indifferently acted. The rationale behind this exhibition never makes any sense. (If Mason has been knocked for being a creampuff, how is fighting an old guy going to help his reputation?) But what gives the movie its emotional core is the vulnerability of Stallone’s performance. Rocky was always most appealing when he was down to earth, an ordinary palooka with a corny sense of humor and a slight melancholy air. Rocky Balboa is that guy, the film exuding an added gravitas because Stallone is undeniably slower and wearier in 2006 than he was in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He didn’t have to act Rocky’s resignation and disappointment — you could see it.

Never the subtlest of filmmakers or performers, Stallone lays it on thick in Rocky Balboa. Bill Conti’s score reworks his indelible Rocky theme, making it more plaintive and hushed, a faded memory. And Stallone gives himself a big, dramatic speech when Rocky tells his son that he’s got to stop being afraid and chase what he really wants. But if Stallone’s delivery isn’t the most elegant, it fits Rocky at this age perfectly. As the Italian Stallion talks about the agony of getting older — how life is always hard and that there’s no escape from its darkest moments — it really feels like Stallone is exorcizing something. Like Rocky, Stallone the artist and person has had plenty of missteps. But maybe this time he can walk away with no regrets. 

Of course, the movie builds to its epic showdown between Rocky and Mason, although it’s telling that the requisite training montage is relatively low-key by this franchise’s adrenalized standards. Maybe it’s because Stallone knew he couldn’t top what he’d done as a younger man, or maybe he just wanted to skip right past it, focusing instead on a bout in which Rocky seems to be striving for something more than winning. It feels weird to worry about spoilers for a 17-year-old movie, but I’ll just say that the outcome is poetic rather than blandly triumphant. Rocky and Mason’s boxing isn’t especially balletic, but it’s desperate, primal and weirdly human, with Rocky fighting his demons as well as the man in the ring with him. Rocky doesn’t need the belt, but he needs some sense of closure — he wants to leave the arena with his dignity regained. Or maybe that’s just Stallone.

Rocky Balboa was a huge hit that Christmas, setting the stage for a Sly renaissance. (A Slyaissance?) Soon, he was doing another Rambo picture, and then hatching The Expendables, a franchise that helped popularize the so-called geri-action subgenre of aging A-listers returning to the big screen to kick ass and take names. And eventually, his career comeback led to 2015’s Creed, which shifted the spotlight to Michael B. Jordan’s Adonis, son of Apollo Creed, who seeks out his dad’s rival-turned-friend, hoping the Italian Stallion can train him. 

Creed earned Stallone his first Oscar nomination since the original Rocky, the new movie praised for breathing life into a series that had only had one new installment in 25 years — and for reminding viewers why they first fell in love with Stallone’s soft-spoken, touchingly decent Rocky Balboa. But, really, that’s what Rocky Balboa had done already. That 2006 movie now occupies a strange space in the Rocky franchise — it’s this little island all by itself, years removed from the original Rocky movies but also nearly a decade before Creed. It’s the forgotten connective tissue between the two eras, but also its own thing.

The new Creed III doesn’t feature Rocky at all, although it’s not clear what has happened to him. (Perhaps they’re leaving room open for his return in Creed IV.) But as much as the Creed films helped restore the franchise’s legacy, Rocky Balboa’s achingly personal take on Rocky’s not-so-golden years makes the movie a worthy finale in its own right. 

At the very end of the film, Rocky visits Adrian’s grave — finally at peace, his burden lifted, the task completed. “Yo, Adrian, we did it,” he says with pride. “We did it.” That sentiment is expressed with immense relief — and it sure seems like Stallone feels the same as his onscreen alter ego. Rocky Balboa is the work of a filmmaker who loved his creation so much he was intent on giving him the proper sendoff. That he felt he owed it to Rocky is what gives this film its poignancy. 

Tim Grierson (@timgrierson) is the senior U.S. critic for Screen International. A frequent contributor to Vulture, Rolling Stone and the Los Angeles Times, he is the author of seven books, including his most recent, This Is How You Make a Movie.