Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky IV re-cut shows a deep passion for the series

This look at Sylvester Stallone’s director’s cut of Rocky VIOriginal publication was in 2021 when the revised edit was made. It has been updated and republished in conjunction with the new interest in the Rocky series — and particularly Stallone’s place in it — following Creed III.

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,” Drago’s ashtray-voiced handler brags. 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 the MTV flash that was in vogue at the time.

Rocky IVThis film is considered one of the greatest films of all time. Nine movies into the franchise, it’s still the highest-grossing entry of the lot. 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. It is scientifically established. 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 amazingly short narrative takes just 91 minutes. Rocky IV It’s more like a training montage rather than a movie. So when Stallone announced his plan for an extended director’s cut, 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 radically 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.

MGM Pictures

Original RockyStallone was a superstar worldwide. It was awarded the Academy Award in 1976 for Best Picture. Network, All the President’s Men,And Taxi driver. The sequels were all 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 and stars at the top of their games; 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 in trilogy. But 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 recut version, Rocky IV: Rocky vs. DragoIs it an improvement? In several cases, absolutely. Stallone was shocked at how many missed punches made it to the theatrical 1985 cut, as shown in the re-making of documentary. 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. Although some absurdly high-pitched sound design was removed, nearly every punch in the recut lands with an actual thud.

Stallone has also gone back and inserted numerous alternate takes that completely alter Apollo Creed’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, where 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 his loving wife Adrian (Talia Shire), believes it’s an act of suicide.

MGM Images

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!”) In this version, Drago is portrayed as an awkwardly willing participant in Russian propaganda. Drago attempts to answer press conferences questions, but is interrupted quickly by his chatterbox boss. There’s a human being underneath the robotic facade, and thanks to Creed IIKnowing what his resistance might ultimately lead to is a relief.

Unfortunately, Stallone 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” makes him feel like a 5-year-old kid getting lost in a carnival funhouse), but Nielsen’s apparatchik has been reduced to a cold-hearted caricature. This seems like an unfair 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 is giving the flashbacks in the “No Easy Way Out” sequence a sepia hue.) While he may be scolded for not including the more serious elements of the drama in his film, the scenes he lets breathe through this revision are totally at odds with the filmmaker’s highly charged aesthetic.

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 is 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. Stallone wasn’t included Creed III, and he’s been distanced from the franchise, since he no longer owns the rights. He still has a strong connection to the stories and their legacy. No one should be surprised that he’s still invested in how people see these movies, and what they see when they watch them again, decades after release.

Rocky IV: Rocky vs. Drago It is also available to rent or buy via Amazon, VuduYou can also visit these other platforms.