Michael B. Jordan is back portraying the heavyweight boxing champion Adonis Creed in ‘Creed III.’ This time, Jordan also directed the film. Photograph: Eli Ade © 2023 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Inc. All Rights Reserved / Click to view the trailer.
Michael B. Jordan, the actor, and now director, agrees on many things with this reviewer.
For one, he considers The Last Dragon (1985) as one of his favorite movies.
The Last Dragon features Bruce Leroy (Taimak), a martial arts enthusiast following the footsteps of Bruce Lee, seeking to become the greatest martial artist in a blaxploitation kungfu comedy, a cult classic with a funky soundtrack that delivers the laughs and the jolts.
Jordan and I are also equally fascinated with the camera and lighting. The whole wonder and the true cinematic movement of the camera infatuated him when he was a young boy. And now he’s standing behind the lens.
Since his first bigger role in Peter Berg’s television series Friday Night Lights as a young American football player Vince Howard (2009-20011) — and many movies after including the two of the previous Rocky spinoffs with Sylvester Stallone — Jordan is now calling the shots, without Rocky.
In Creed III, Jordan plays a mature Adonis Creed, a former boxing heavyweight champion of the world turned promoter.
The story is darker than in the previous installments. Creed must overcome serious life-altering events from his past after meeting with his former best friend Damian Anderson (Jonathan Majors) who reappears after having done time for the past two decades. Creed, however, is not a man who tends to stare into the back mirror, and Rocky’s absence, in a way, strengthens the message.
Jordan and Major respectively are both in great shape, and the fight scenes utilize the latest Imax cameras for a very high-definition experience of watching punches pummeling sweat-dripping bodies.
The boxing techniques draw inspiration from anime to the cross-armed defense of the former heavyweight champion, George Foreman, and even from 52 blocks, the latter being a fighting style popularized in American prisons, dirty boxing of sorts, which among other things, utilizes surprising close quarter defense movements: elbow blocks, sharp-angled counterstrikes … without forgetting hard-hitting attacks with lefts and rights.
One of the most powerful aspects of Creed III, though, is the emotional depth portrayed by the whole cast. The acting of Tessa Thompson, as Adonis’ wife Bianca Creed, resembles some of the finest moments between Rocky and his partner, Adrian (Talia Shire), in the original Rocky movies of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.
All in all, Jordan’s directing debut is an emotional rollercoaster with plenty of knockout action and a welcome change to what started as the Rockyverse now becoming the Creedverse.
‘Creed III’ premieres in Finland on March 3. Running time: 117 minutes.
