Adonis “Donnie” Creed doesn’t walk with a swagger, but he wears his tight-fitting casually expensive clothes as if he might. Exiting the boxing academy he owns, he sees a shabbily dressed heavy-set man in a hoodie leaning against his car. Donnie is warily cheerful: he wants the man to know he will fight him if it comes to it. But no — it’s Dame, an old buddy jailed for years and whom Donnie hasn’t seen since they were kids in 2002. They exchange pleasantries. For old times sake and, worse, pity, Donnie invites him to lunch at a greasy spoon. The cheeseburgers and banter do not dispel the wariness. Dame, in awe of Donnie’s money and power, grins like a man who thinks they should have traded places; Donnie for his part tries to squeeze the condescension out of his voice, wants to signal openness about re-animating their friendship under different terms.
I wrote at length about this riveting scene, which occurs a quarter into Creed III, because so rare is it to watch an American film — the third in a series of post-Rocky films and the #1 box office attraction this weekend — pay such attention to male-male relations. Competition, vanity, and love are incompatible, it suggests, but the effort persists anyway. If Michael B. Jordan never directs a film again after this debut, he can blush with pride about this sequence. And Jonathan Majors, who plays Dame, is up to it. I haven’t seen anything like it since the reunion of Chiron and Kevin in Moonlight, although that relationship depended on the memory of brief erotic fulfillment while Donnie and Dame suggest no queerness. The sequence’s fulfillment occurs in Creed III‘s closing minutes when during the post-fight denouement in the locker room a look pregnant with regret passes between them.
The movie needs those sequences. The rest of it is entertaining balderdash. And when I write “balderdash” I mean “two people are credited with an incoherent script.” No one who pays $15 to watch Creed III goes for narrative cleanness or surprises; they probably don’t pay for the complexity I explained earlier. But Keenan Coogler and Zach Baylin doesn’t bother clarifying how Dame, out of shape and an ex-con, would just qualify for the heavyweight championship fight against Donnie’s up-and-comer (José Benavidez Jr.). Nor does it give Tessa Thompson much to do as Donnie’s wife Bianca besides utter platitudes like “You have to forgive yourself” after introducing her as a successful hook writer for R&B singers (Kehlani makes a brief marvelous appearance); she ended her career as a singer because of hearing problems. Now that would’ve been a terrific movie. In other instances Jordan’s direction is functional at best: slo-mo shots of beaded sweat coming off the body, that sort of thing, though the fight scenes retain their authenticity. I was more offended by hamhanded visual cues such as the close-up of a gun during the Donnie/Dame flashback (cue Chekhov line), or when after Donnie advises Mama (Phylicia Rashad) not to tempt another stroke with a second glass of wine she ups and dies of one before The Big Fight. To her credit, Rashad’s deathbed scene, ruthless in its tearjerking, is one of the best played I’ve seen in years. Give her more film roles, please.
Getting back into shape for The Big Fight at Dodger Stadium in what must be record time (he punches trees and does curls, but not even Tom Cruise pulled off in Top Gun: Maverick anything as awesome as Jordan pulling a single engine plane like a donkey with a cart) Donnie enters the ring armed with gloves and Zen koans supplied by his Yoda, Tony “Little Duke” Evers (Wood Harris), ready to reclaim his title. The ending is as foreordained as California sunshine. An actor as inquisitive as Jordan might have accepted this script as a challenge; now that he’s helmed a hit he should find other projects (the first Creed, directed by Ryan Coogler, was a fresh surpise). Hollywood needs Black directors who work this intuitively with their cast. Tim to hang up those gloves, Donnie.
GRADE: B-
Humanizing The Vacuum 