can't take the fight out of the boy. Although Adonis is
unbeaten in a string of semi-clandestine bouts in Mexico, he is turned away from his father's former gym. No
one in Los Angeles will go against Mary Anne's wishes
and allow her adopted son to participate in the sport that
killed her husband. What else can Adonis do? He travels
to Philadelphia, where Rocky (Stallone, as if that needed
saying) is running a restaurant and keeping a low profile.
He's all done with boxing, but Adonis persuades him to
give it one more try. They start training, and before long
a shot at the title materializes, a classic mismatch with a
British brawler named Ricky Conlan (Tony Bellew). Like
Rocky himself almost 40 years earlier, Adonis is a designated tomato can for a superior fighter.And like Rocky,
Adonis falls for a lovely Philadelphian, a musician named
Bianca (Tessa Thompson), who schools him in the local
cuisine and the local slang. ("What's a jawn?" he asks
her over cheese steaks.) She teases him for having a
white uncle (Adonis' nickname for Rocky is Unk) and
gets mad when she finds out that Adonis has been hiding the truth about his pedigree.A boxing movie without
cliches is like a political campaign without lies. Creed,
directed by Ryan Coogler from a script he wrote with
Aaron Covington, is self-aware without being cute about
it. In the movie as in the world beyond it, Rocky is part
of the cultural tapestry. Everyone in Philadelphia knows
him. There's even a statue! But Coogler, a 29-year-old
filmmaker whose debut was Fruitvale Station (also starring Jordan), looks at the Rocky story and the tradition of
Hollywood pugilism through a fresh prism.Rocky was the
story of a Great White Hope, and also a fable for an era
of racial backlash. Apollo Creed, played by Carl Weathers, was the heavy in that movie, and Rocky was the
noble underdog. Later, they set aside their differences
and faced a common Soviet enemy as the series turned
its attention to Cold War geopolitics. By then, Apollo was
the sidekick and the sacrificial friend, an injustice that
"Creed," by its very title, seeks to redress. The movie
is also a Hollywood rarity: a boxing movie with a black
hero. It is bizarre - though hardly surprising - that a sport
dominated for decades by African-American and Latino athletes looks more like ice hockey on screen. And
Creed, like Fruitvale Station, embeds its drama in the
perils and pleasures of black life in America. Adonis is a
complex character with a complex fate. He is at once a
rich kid and a street kid, the proud carrier of an illustrious heritage and an invisible man. His relationship with
Rocky is complicated, too. The older fighter is a mentor
and a father figure, to be sure, but he also needs someone to take care of him, especially when illness adds
a melodramatic twist to the plot. Rocky has reconciled
himself to loss. The people he loved - Paulie, Mickey,
Creed and Adrian - are all gone. It's too simple to say
that Adonis