Rocky Balboa!

I saw Rocky Balboa last night - the movie, not the person (well, I saw the person in the movie). I really enjoyed it.

Sylvester Stallone has had a bumpy ride in the media - bumpier than he deserved. Everyone agrees that the first Rocky, back in 1977, was a superb movie, with universal heart and Philadelphia moxie. Most people think the series went downhill after that. Few critics have much good to say about Rambo, and gave mixed to pan reviews of Stallone's other movies.

In contrast, I liked Rocky II and III just fine, and Stallone's 1995 Assassins (in which he starred with Antonio Banderas and Julianne Moore, and which Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman awarded a "C") is on my top-15 all-time favorite movie list (I agree that it doesn't quite have the majesty to be on my Top 10). And, while we're at it, I thought Stallone was excellent in The Specialist in 1994, too, playing with style alongside James Woods, Sharon Stone, and Eric Roberts (who, by the way, also doesn't get the kudos he deserves).

So, unlike many of the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes - which gave Rocky Balboa a 76% positive rating, but laced with expressions of surprise that the movie was so good - I wasn't the least bit surprised.

Stallone from the beginning has combined a kind of street poetry and wisdom in his Rocky movies, with the action and classic underdog heart-strings. He seems the complete antithesis of what we might expect an erudite writer to look and sound like, but for my money Stallone comes through with lines every bit as good as what we get (and sometimes do not get) from David Mamet and Tom Stoppard. There were at least four or five scenes in Rocky Balboa where what came out of his mouth were pure words of the prophet written on the subway walls - not about political life, but life itself, about growing old and staying vital. I was moved.

The movie also had other winning touches - especially Milo Ventimiglia (of Heroes fame!) as Rocky's son, Geraldine Hughes (I saw her once on ER) as just the beginning of a love interest (with Adrian gone), and Burt Young as the perennial Paulie. The restaurant scenes were tasty, the fight scenes heart-in-your-mouth, and the finale both surprising and satisfying.

And the movie also had some great meta-touches - my favorite was Rocky lamenting that the good city of Philadelphia had removed his statue. (It was restored in September 2006 - probably as a result of the movie - good! - but not to universal acclaim. See Mark Vallen's "Rocky" Road for Philadelphia Art for an especially dyspeptic assessment.)

And you know what? Many of the positive reviews also said they hoped this would be the last Rocky, because Stallone had ended it so well.

I hope it's not.