Rocky IV director’s cut review: Stallone drops a ferocious, flawed redux

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Rocky IVThe film is a movie of 1980s beauty that was highly commercialized. Sylvester Stallone cleverly capitalised on the anti-Russian charm of Part II: Rambo’s First BloodTo tell the story of a Cold War Underdog to Western audiences. The enemy: Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), the Soviet Union’s pulverizing, pugilistic savior. “Whatever he hits, he destroys,” brags Drago’s ashtray-voiced handler. When the Russian kills Rocky’s former-adversary-turned-best-friend Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) in an exhibition match, it’s clear he’s got an All-American knuckle supper coming, and Stallone serves it up with loads of MTV flash (which was the style at the time).

Rocky IVIt is one of the most important films of its time. It’s still the highest-grossing entry in the franchise. It’s no one’s favorite Rocky movie, but no one in the history of the world has ever started watching it and turned it off. This fact is proven scientifically. And it is a truth universally acknowledged that not a single person on the planet has ever been in want of a director’s cut.

Other than Stallone.

Its remarkably short narrative lasts just 91 minutes. Rocky IV’s more training montage than movie. So when Stallone announced an “extended director’s cut” this past September, the notion sounded like grist for an SNL Digital Short. The actor-director, however, was a deathly serious man. Rocky IV. This once gaudy touchstone of ‘80s cinema has been transformed into a strangely grim rumination on the warrior’s code Visually and tonally, it’s a much different experience. And let’s get this straight: those “42 minutes of new footage” promised in the press announcement are in there, but at 93 minutes (with credits), it also means a third of the movie that’s been a cable mainstay since the beginning of the glasnost era is gone. This is not your bearded Gen X uncle’s Rocky IV.

Rocky stares at a giant russian banner of Drago

MGM Pictures

Original RockyStallone became a worldwide superstar. The 1976 Academy Award was given to it for Best Picture. Network All the President’s MenAnd Taxi driver. The sequels have all been snapshots of Stallone’s career at the moment they were made: Rocky IIThis is the story of an instant success who struggles with sudden fame. Rocky IIIIt is the lack of hunger which affects the champions/stars who are at the peak of their game. Rocky V charts the champion’s inevitable decline; Rocky Balboa refutes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s contention that there are no second acts in American life; and the CreedThe importance of legacy is addressed by duology. Rocky IV … really isn’t about much of anything. Apollo and Rocky are staring down impending retirement, but the former’s intimated fears of Russia taking over the boxing world with laboratory-created supermen run roughshod over any kind of meaningful introspection. There’s a touch of the John Henry folk legend in there, but, at its core, it’s a revenge flick leavened by some saccharine lip service about Americans and Russians learning to view each other as fellow human beings (which the entire politburo stands up and cheers at the film’s conclusion).

So is Stallone’s new version, dubbed Rocky IV: Rocky vs. DragoIs it an improvement? In several cases, absolutely. Stallone, as shown in the re-making of documentary that is now available online on YouTube, was shocked at how many missed punches made it to the 1985 theatrical cut. He’s proud of the final fight’s ferociousness (as he should be considering that a series of flush Lundgren punches to his chest left him with a swollen heart that landed him in the ICU), but in today’s blown-up HD world those occasional whiffs are glaringly obvious. The recut shows almost all punches landing with a real thud, although some ridiculously overdone sound effects have been reduced.

Stallone’s also gone back and inserted numerous alternate takes that completely alter Apollo’s tragic arc. Taking on Drago is no longer an act of stupid hubris, but an obligation, which is made clear in Duke’s eulogy wherein Creed’s trainer and default father eloquently defends his fighter’s fatal decision. “The Warrior has the right to choose his way of life and his way of death.” This echoes a newly added moment in Creed’s fight with Drago where Rocky pleads with his friend, “Don’t do this to me.” “I’m doing this for me,” snaps Apollo. This gives Rocky’s inevitable bout with Drago a deeper purpose than vengeance; he, too, is obeying the warrior’s code, and he doesn’t care if everyone, even Adrian, believes it’s an act of suicide.

Rocky holds a dying Apollo Creed in his arms after a boxing match

MGM Image

How this squares with Drago’s reconfigured arc is tricky. In the theatrical cut, Drago’s late-fight rebellion against his handlers felt like the act of a petulant child (“I fight for me!”). Drago appears as an ineptly willing participant of Russian propaganda. Drago attempts to answer press conferences questions, but is soon interrupted by his chatterbox boss. There’s a human being underneath the robotic facade, and, thanks to Creed IIWe know how much his resistance is going to cost him. Unfortunately, Stallone’s eliminated Brigitte Nielsen’s indignant outburst where her sincere-sounding claims of death threats against her husband are laughed off by the media. There may be a slightly more human dimension to Drago in the director’s cut (his bewildered perspective during James Brown’s performance of “Living in America” is like a five-year-old kid getting lost in a carnival funhouse), but Nielsen’s apparatchik has been reduced to a cold-hearted caricature. It feels unfair to make this tradeoff.

What Stallone can’t fully expunge is the essential silliness of a film that was shot and edited to appeal to music-video-mad viewers. He persuasively defends the power of montage in the documentary, and he hasn’t monkeyed around too much with those sequences in this cut (the biggest change would be giving the flashbacks in the “No Easy Way Out” sequence a sepia hue). While he may be shaming himself for not including the more serious elements of the drama in the documentary, the scenes he lets breathe through this revision are totally at odds with his adrenalized vision of the movie. He’s washed out the comic book vibrancy of Bill Butler’s cinematography, which only makes this outsized entertainment film kind of dead inside. And most controversially of all, he’s eliminated all traces of Paulie’s robot, Sico. In doing so, he’s whittled Burt Young’s performance down to just about nothing, which blunts the impact of Paulie’s goofily touching pre-bout outburst of gratitude to Rocky (“If I could just unzip myself and step out and be someone else, I’d wanna be you”). Paulie’s an integral part of the Balboa saga, and he deserves better.

Stallone’s passion for the character of Drago is infectious, and watching him meticulously refine 35-year-old scenes in a Sunset Strip editing suite is an unexpected thrill. Stallone, 75 years old, still embodies the warrior spirit. And when it’s announced in the coming months that DragoNo one should be shocked that this is his next film. He’s still got a few rounds left in him.

Rocky IV: Rocky vs. Drago Premieres HuluVOD and telephony on November 12.

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