Just how epic is the training montage in Creed III? Put it this way: the film’s star, Michael B Jordan, manages to grow a full beard and then shave it back off again before it ends. Jordan’s Adonis (or Donnie) Creed, son of Apollo Creed from the Rocky films, is preparing for his big comeback bout after three years away from the circuit.
Quite frankly, CrossFit and protein shakes are not going to cut it. Instead, his stalwart coach Duke (Wood Harris) puts him on a classic movie boxer fitness regime: punching trees, flipping tractor tyres down the beach, jogging up to the Hollywood sign at sunrise before gazing pensively across Los Angeles, and dragging an aeroplane down a runway with his bare hands. Ever since the original Rocky in 1976, such sequences have been one of the boxing picture’s definitive pleasures, and Jordan’s first as both star and director is impressively committed to pleasing a crowd. Perhaps in pursuit of that mission, Creed III ends up playing the hits to a fault. But when the hits mostly land like gut-juddering haymakers, it’s hard to grouse too much.
A suspenseful prologue, which makes nerve-prickling use of Dr Dre’s The Watcher, introduces the ghost from Donnie’s past who comes back to haunt our hero’s luxurious retirement. He’s Damian, a gifted young boxer sent to prison for 18 years after he and Donnie became involved in a fracas outside a convenience store, and ever since he’s been watching his childhood friend enjoy the success he feels should rightfully be his.
In the present, Damian is played by Jonathan Majors, the star of The Last Black Man in San Francisco, and an actor suddenly much in demand. In Ant-Man 3 the other week he was being teed up as Marvel’s next big villain, but in every respect this is a beefier role – and one that capitalises on the unsettling contrast between his kindly eyes and fearsome physique. Like Donnie, we’re never quite sure how much of a threat Damian really is.
Keenan Coogler and Zach Baylin’s script makes the preposterous manoeuvre of having Donnie enter this unknown ex-con into a world championship title fight, essentially as a favour to get his old friend back on his feet. And when someone quite reasonably asks whether anyone will actually buy tickets for this bizarre event, Donnie reminds them that the original Rocky film did something similar, so no need to make a fuss about it here.