Rocky Balboa is here, and not a moment too soon. It’s been 20 years since the last Rocky movie (most purists don’t consider 1990’s abysmal Rocky V to be part of the canon), when the Italian Stallion did battle in the USSR in Rocky IV, and while most so-called “historians” credit President Reagan with ending the Cold War, us enlightened folks know that it was Balboa’s stunning defeat of Soviet behemoth Ivan Drago in a 1985 exhibition bout that truly broke the back of the Evil Empire.
These days, with the country torn apart by a divisive war, who better to bring us together than the Italian Stallion?
Cynics may view Sylvester Stallone’s decision to revive the Rocky character as an aging action star’s desperate attempt to revive a flagging career. After all, Schwarzenegger did it with Terminator 3 and Bruce Willis is about to do it with Live Free or Die Hard. Why not return to the well?
Stallone offers his own reasons for reviving the franchise that launched his career. “I have to admit that I had this real beast in me,” says Stallone. “It's been gnawing at me for ten, twelve years, how badly Rocky V fared. And I take all the blame for that.”
“I think it was a reflection of my lack of focus at the time, and it just was translated on to film,” adds Stallone. “It's really interesting – it's almost a CAT scan of where you are. It really defeated all the other Rocky's, and it bothered me because the people that had been so loyal to it. So that beast was finally eliminated with this film.”
If Stallone had gotten his way, his signature character would have been killed off in the previous film. “In Rocky V he was supposed to die,” he says. “When all that changed, it became kind of like this soapy ending, kind of like a feathered fish. He's supposed to die in the street – he's a street person. It's kind of a morbid ending, but that's where it was supposed to go.”
In the new film, familiar faces are joined by fresh ones. While Burt Young returns (playing the loveable drunken racist Paulie), Talia Shire does not. In the course of writing the script, Rocky’s wife Adrian was sacrificed for the sake of the story.
“You have to pull a man's heart out,” explains Stallone. “You take away the thing that he loves the most in the world – take it out of his life – he now plummets to the depths of despair. And there's nothing more traumatic than taking Adrian out of his life.”
Getting back in fighting shape at the age of 60 was not an easy feat. “The training for this was extremely difficult and riddled with a lot of injuries,” jokes Stallone. “Things that worked thirty years ago, you know, are a little rusty. Kind of felt like the tin man before he got his can of oil – very, very stiff.”
The pain was worth it, however, because it allowed him to experience something far more elusive than wealth or fame: contentment. “I've maybe had to sell out a few times in my life,” says Stallone, “because we all have to sell out on the road of life. But in the very end I made up for that and did it my way, and I feel good about being myself. And I think that kind of sense of peace is what I was fighting for in this film.”
For his next project, Stallone again ventures into familiar territory: Rambo IV: Pearl of the Cobra is currently in pre-production.
After that, he hopes to move forward with one of his dream projects, an Edgar Allen Poe biopic. “I would like to probably direct Poe after this,” says Stallone. “It's something I've wanted to do. I've talked about it so much, I feel like I've made it fifty times.”
“It'll probably bomb anyway.”
Rocky Balboa opens Wednesday, December 20, 2006.
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