Movie Review: Rocky Balboa

Rented "Rocky Balboa" over the weekend from Pay-Per-View. On the plus side, I only paid $3.99 to rent it instead of watching it for full price on the big screen. That's about it for the plus side.

In this, the 37th in the Rocky series, Rocky has become Ronald Reagan... old, doddering, recapturing his innocence through his senility, grandfatherly in his affections. This is a rehash of every Rocky movie with major cutting and pasting from the original. I'm thinking someone said to Stallone... "You know, if you could only write one like the first one, you'd really have something" and he said "Why write a whole new movie when I can cut and paste and make it as endearing as one of those great flashback episodes of the Golden Girls? Save time, save film, and we know the original film was a winner so why mess with it when we can simply sample it!?"

And so it goes.

I don't think I'm giving anything away by telling you there's a boxing match at the climax of the film. It's these kinds of surprises that keep the film fresh and hip. Yuh.

For this lackluster, shmaltzy rehashing, I give the film 1/2 a jujubee out of a possible 4. The 1/2 jujubee is for the fact that they also reused the best music from the original film for the soundtrack, including "Take You Back" and "Gotta Fly Now (Theme from Rocky)."