Rocky IV director’s cut review: Stallone drops a ferocious, flawed redux

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Rocky IV, a film of ultra-commercialized 1980s beauty. Sylvester Stallone savvily capitalized on the anti-Russian swagger of Rambo: First Blood Part II to bring Western audiences a crowd-pleasing Cold War underdog story. The enemy: Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), the Soviet Union’s pulverizing, pugilistic savior. “Whatever he hits, he destroys,” brags Drago’s ashtray-voiced handler. When the Russian kills Rocky’s former-adversary-turned-best-friend Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) in an exhibition match, it’s clear he’s got an All-American knuckle supper coming, and Stallone serves it up with loads of MTV flash (which was the style at the time).

Rocky IV is a significant film of its era. It’s still the highest-grossing entry in the franchise. It’s no one’s favorite Rocky movie, but no one in the history of the world has ever started watching it and turned it off. This is a scientifically proven fact. And it is a truth universally acknowledged that not a single person on the planet has ever been in want of a director’s cut.

Except for Stallone.

Given its remarkably slender narrative of 91 minutes, Rocky IV’s more training montage than movie. So when Stallone announced an “extended director’s cut” this past September, the notion sounded like grist for an SNL Digital Short. But the actor-director was deathly serious, and, now, so is Rocky IV. This once gaudy touchstone of ‘80s cinema has been transformed into a strangely grim rumination on the warrior’s code. Visually and tonally, it’s a much different experience. And let’s get this straight: those “42 minutes of new footage” promised in the press announcement are in there, but at 93 minutes (with credits), it also means a third of the movie that’s been a cable mainstay since the beginning of the glasnost era is gone. This is not your bearded Gen X uncle’s Rocky IV.

Image: MGM Pictures

The original Rocky turned Stallone into a global superstar. It won the 1976 Academy Award for Best Picture over Network, All the President’s Men and Taxi Driver. The sequels have all been snapshots of Stallone’s career at the moment they were made: Rocky II is about an overnight success struggling with the demands of sudden fame; Rocky III contends with the loss of hunger that afflicts champions/stars at the top of their game; Rocky V charts the champion’s inevitable decline; Rocky Balboa refutes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s contention that there are no second acts in American life; and the Creed duology deals with the importance of legacy. Rocky IV … really isn’t about much of anything. Apollo and Rocky are staring down impending retirement, but the former’s intimated fears of Russia taking over the boxing world with laboratory-created supermen run roughshod over any kind of meaningful introspection. There’s a touch of the John Henry folk legend in there, but, at its core, it’s a revenge flick leavened by some saccharine lip service about Americans and Russians learning to view each other as fellow human beings…