‘Rocky IV’ or — Warning! Can Potentially Cause Brain Damage.
(Spoilers for ‘Rocky IV’)
“I like this eighties’ movie kick you’ve been on recently,” my friend told me. “You should watch more of them.”
Happy to oblige I settled down last night to finally watch ‘Rocky IV’ (1985). I’d stopped at film 3 of the Rocky franchise as IV looked shit (it is!) and all I knew of this entry was that Rocky fought a Russian, that Apollo Creed dies and that there’s a robot in it. That might’ve been my rationale for watching it — to find out why there’s a robot in a Rocky film. What I didn’t know was that having a robot in a Rocky film would be the LEAST idiotic, and downright offensive, thing about this movie!
The warning signs are there from the start with the film opening with a weirdly, and almost impressively, surreal shot of two disembodied boxing-gloves coloured as the Soviet and American flags flying across the screen, impacting and then exploding on contact. It’s the sort of shot that would’ve been rejected from ‘The Triumph of The Will’ (1935) for being too ridiculously propagandistic… and we’re only 3 seconds into this movie.
The plot to ‘Rocky IV’ is shockingly simple, and I can’t emphasise that enough. It goes like this, so you might want to concentrate — Apollo fights Drago, Drago beats Apollo; Drago fights Rocky, Rocky beats Drago. Everybody get that, or shall I go over it again?
There is NOTHING more going on in this move than that. Nothing at all. In fact, what else there is consists of montages so there’s even LESS going on than what little is actually going on. It’s enough to hurt your head. Indeed, thank god there is a robot in this movie because without that in it there’d almost be nothing left at all apart from the fighting. The script is startlingly minimalistic in how provocatively basic it is; it’s as though Stallone wrote it in a day and I’m talking about a day where he’d slept in till noon and had other shit to do.
So Apollo fights Drago, a cartoonishly cartoon baddie surrounded by his cartoonishly cartoon Soviet team of evil Russians, and Apollo has the good fortune to be killed hence allowing him to escape from the movie. It’s then down to Rocky, who just wants to change into a regular person even though he’s just bought his friend a fucking robot, to travel to the Soviet Union and defeat Drago on his own, Communist turf.
Because the focus is on Apollo for the first 40 mins or so it means that when Rocky does become the centre of the story that the movie has to drastically reestablish itself after Creed’s death. It achieves providing Rocky a personality by the laziest way possible — a flashback montage. That’s all Rocky’s character is — a montage in human form. In fact, it’s also all the rest of the movie is because that’s then followed by training montages and more montages and all driven along by the most god-awful music you’ll ever hear in a movie. The soundtrack to this film is absolutely unbearable.
Although the music isn’t as distasteful as the politics which gleefully exploits the United States’ almost sexual, saber-rattling (there’s a lot of repressed homo-eroticism manifesting as violence here) against a clearly defined enemy. Yay! We have a baddie to fight! It’s the Reagan Doctrine simplified to an even more infantile level and making me wonder if Stallone ever understood any of the geo-political themes he was playing about with all the dexterity of handling china with boxing gloves. Indeed, the only bit of tension in the entire film is at the end when Rocky is talking to the entire planet by television and I was wondering if he might say something stupid and accidentally start World War III. I was certainly hoping he would.
‘Rocky IV’ is a truly distasteful, awful and offensive movie with a nasty propagandistic, right-wing streak. I could actively feel my brain cells dying as I watched it (Is this what gave Reagan Alzheimer’s? Did he binge watch it several times one weekend in the White House in a burst of patriotic perversion and his mind just caved?).
Fortunately ‘Rocky IV’ has a secret weapon; it’s blunt and brutal but it’s effective, and it’s this — it’s short! ‘Rocky IV’ is only an hour and a half long so there’s not many minutes of it to sit through. Sure, all those minutes are horrible, intolerable and ghastly but there’s only ninety of them.
‘Rocky IV’ represents everything about eighties cinema I detest. It also represents everything about America at its worst and I could feel my inner Chomsky flailing about and having a seizure inside my head as I watched it. And it’s weird state of affairs when an obviously sentient robot that’s also explicitly engaging with sexual relations with one of the characters is the least fucked-up aspect about the movie.
Like Apollo, this film left me lying on the floor, drooling and with large parts of my cerebral cortex severely damaged. I never want to sit through this film again. I should’ve watched ‘Flashdance’ instead.
