Rocky Balboa (**3/4)

? Sylvester Stallone’s unabashedly nostalgic sequel finds the boxer mourning his late wife and running a South Philly restaurant named after her. But the lure of the ring beckons in the form of surly heavyweight champion Mason “The Line” Dixon, in need of an image boost.

+ For better or worse, this is Stallone’s attempt to re-create the feeling of the first film, and he’s fairly successful. Rocky spends the first hour visiting his wife’s grave, checking out old haunts, adopting a mangy dog, hanging with his mopey old brother-in-law Paulie (Burt Young), and telling old war stories to his customers, the better to remind us that Rocky’s a regular guy. It’s no coincidence that you only hear him talking about Apollo, who defeated him in the first film, or that the sixth film in the series has no number. Stallone would like us to forget the other, mediocre sequels, so the story closely follows the outline of the first and best film. Rocky has decided to return to boxing, but gets an unexpected shot at the big time. There’s even a sort of substitute (younger) Adrian, sweetly played by Geraldine Hughes. Bill Conti’s original theme music is there, too. I think Stallone would have dug Burgess Meredith up if he could have. In films II through V, Stallone worked hard at coming up with ways to keep Rocky seeming like an underdog, even though he kept winning, making for some heavy melodrama. Mason Dixon, played by the light heavyweight Antonio Tarver, doesn’t seem as menacing as Clubber Lang or Ivan Drago (from III and IV), but pushing 60 will make any boxer seem like an underdog. Still, Stallone looks better than almost any other 60-year-old guy. (For the record, Archie Moore, at 48, was the oldest man to ever hold a real world title.)

- If all of the above sounds pretty dull, you’ll want to avoid this. There is only one boxing match, and there’s not a lot of plot. The other characters are there more to show you that Rocky is still the same guy from the streets of Philadelphia, rather than move the story along. I’m not sure why Dixon’s handlers think beating up an old guy will boost his image; he’s one of Rocky’s duller opponents in any case.

= **3/4 I enjoyed this for what it was, a walk down memory lane, which it clearly was for Stallone, the actor and writer, too. If you’ve wondered, hey, what would Rocky be doing in late middle age, and would he still train by drinking raw eggs and punching meat, this is your film.

IMDb link