Never posted my thoughts on ROCKY V, d'oh!
After wishing that the previous two films hadn't rocketed into caricature and absurdity, ROCKY V seems like a return to the low reality of the original two. And, go figure, there are things I very much liked about this movie. A circular return to Rocky's neighborhood, making Adrian a more prominent voice after her being sidelined in the prior two films. Most interesting to me was the promise of a sobering look at boxing. Boxing isolates Rocky from his family. Boxing gives Rocky a mild sort of brain damage (movie brain damage, admittedly). Boxing produces anger-driven violent men like Tommy Gunn. Boxing is full of predatory promoters like George Washington Duke (who's the most interesting new personality in the film). In short, boxing has problems.
Sure, the movie starts out with an odd contrivance: Paulie accidentally signed away power of attorney for Rocky's estate, which then went deeply into debt. The legalese doesn't track, and you'd figure Rocky has a number of options for paying off his debts (print advertisements, fundraisers, an appeal to the city that loves him so much they gave him a goddamn statue). And then Sage Stallone as Rocky's son doesn't quite have the talent to pull off his own scenes (he's not terrible, he's just not charismatic). And then you realize that Tommy Gunn is being held up less as a dark mirror to Rocky and more as a foil for Rocky's relationship with his son, who Rocky evidently doesn't care about, and we can't really blame Rocky's negligence on brain damage, so we're left with "Rocky is stupid about his son because the film needs him to be stupid, or else there's no story." And then you realize that Tommy Gunn similarly lacks charisma. You see the single-mindedness, but, like Clubber Lang, what you see is what you get (even then, Tommy Gunn doesn't have the presence or specificity of Mr. T's Clubber).
These storylines converge in a final scene of surprising awfulness, in which Rocky settles the score with Tommy Gunn in a street fight. After the film has repeatedly painted Rocky's potential boxing as problematic at best and deadly at worst (apparently Stallone first wrote the ending so Rocky would die), the film then totally contradicts itself with Rocky triumphantly reuniting with his family and settling grudges through the power of punching. It's like the film is saying, "Boxing is a complicated and ultimately unfortunate business-- NEVERMIND PUNCH THAT MEAN BOY."
I thought this film would be absurdly awful, given its historical status as the worst of the films. And I think that people are right, that ROCKY V is the worst one. But what surprised me is how much I thought the film could've been, and how gradually - almost imperceptibly - it slid from promising to dull to disappointing to just plain stupid.
[Also, we should've seen the robot from ROCKY IV being sold at the estate sale, and you watch Paulie's tearful face as it rolls out of his life.]