I've never been ashamed to admit that I think quite highly of the original 1976 Rocky, and nor should I be. It did win Best Picture and Best Director at the 1977 Oscars, after all, and the screenplay, as well as four(!) of its actors were nominated: Stallone, Burgess Meredith, Talia Shire, and Burt Young. (In verifying the Best Picture award, I also noticed that Stallone was only the 3rd person to be nominated for acting and writing the same year, following Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles. Impressive!) That original film is not an action movie - what one would expect of a movie about boxing - but a drama about personal courage and dreams. If you understand this movie, you get that the decision of the judges after Rocky has gone the distance with the champ is irrelevant. That's something that the sequels were just unable to incorporate because the messages in those films became too ridiculously simple in their metaphorical attempts (Hey, look! Rocky is beating the hell out of that Russian! U-S-A! U-S-A!). This film gets the closest to returning to more human themes.

Rocky Balboa is about the lead character "cleaning out his basment." He has lingering sentiments about his career and gets back in the ring once more so he can ostensibly put them to bed. What the film doesn't explain is why he should feel that way, and so Rocky comes off a bit more egoistic than before. This movie might have made more sense if the 3rd, 4th and 5th films hadn't been made and his legacy not so explicit: kicked the crap out of Mr. T, kicked the crap out of He-Man, kicked the crap Mullet Man. It would have been more fascinating to imagine from scratch his career after winning the title. Of course, I'd have been content with only the first movie having been made, but if your going to make the second, then you can make this one, or the one I am suggesting they might have made, without the intervening pollution.

Anyway, in order to settle things for himself, he gets back in the ring to fight Mason "The Line" Dixon, a virtually unchallenged champ who has been suffering self-doubt, especially after a computer-generated fight between the two has Rocky winning. The movie is very short on story about Mason and I'm not sure that's entirely problematic. Nothing much was said about Apollo Creed's backstory in the first film, but Carl Weathers' perfomance gives you all the detail you need about who Apollo is and what he's about. Antonio Tarver is not so capable as that, but his character was meant to represent something more subtle, and one can only expect so much out of an actual fighter, not an actor.

A returning character with a bit part in the first movie - Marie, a streetwise teen - returns and helps connect this movie to its past much more than all the efforts in Rocky V combined. it's not the same actress, but she was convincing enough that, watching it, I wasn't sure at the time. Also returning is Pedro Lovell as Spider Rico, whom I will be honest enough to admit I didn't recognize. Meh. Unimportant, really.

There are wonderful moments of symbolism that amplify the message of this film, such as Rocky replacing the burnt out bulb in Marie's porchlight. It means something for the both of them that a light long-thought extinguished can be brought back brighter than ever. And Rocky's ascent of the steps takes place in this movie during full snowfall, an apt visual parallel to Rocky's age: the winter of his life. These things are what made me believe I was in the hands of someone who understood the key elements of this story.

What did NOT help was the too-long excursion at the beginning of the movie where Rocky visits all the meaningful places of his relationship with his now-deceased wife (oh...uh, *spoiler alert*.. but then, if you've seen the cast list, you know Talia Shire isn't in this), and the ineptly executed story of Rocky's relationship with his son - though, in defense of the latter, it yielded probably Rocky's best speech in the film. It feels like these side stories are there mostly to fill in the spaces until we get to the meat of Rocky's moment, but they aren't entirely insignificant. They just don't seem relevant to why Rocky wants to embark on this journey.

The ending - if you can guess it - is as satisfying to this movie as the ending to the first film was to it. Which is to say, this is a lesser version of that film, and the ending is less satisfying than that one for only that reason. I didn't leave with any answer as to why Rocky felt the need to go toe-to-toe once more, but his future can now be entertained in the imagination with the same degree of satisfaction as his past might have been had we not seen episodes three, four and five. And that's at least saying something.