Creed III

Michael B. Jordan behind the camera. The suddenly ubiquitous Jonathan Majors as Adonis Creed’s adversary. And no marble-mouthed Sylvester Stallone in sight.

It’s a spectacle so compelling one would think Don King himself put it together. But in actuality, Creed III is the result of thoughtful consideration by artists at long last seeing the full potential of a Rocky spinoff series and enacting it in a manner that stands (chiseled) shoulders above the saga’s two preceding films.

Sure, Ryan Coogler’s Creed featured visual artistry unseen in modern boxing movies and all but required Stallone’s Rocky Balboa as a necessary evil to link the past and present, but the actor’s unintelligible performance also proved a constant distraction and hampered a film yearning to operate on its own terms.

Rather than build on that potential, the tired motions that Creed II thoughtlessly rambled through suggested these films were now wholly stuck in the cliché machine, destined to repeat the paces of its ’80s forebears with offspring of Rocky characters and a modern-day setting being its lone deviations from the norm.

Creed III, however, is the film this series always had lurking beneath its nostalgia-beholden veneer, and it’s a joy to see these characters and this world finally breathe and come into their own as fully-formed entities.

Critical to them taking that next step is the script from Keenan Coogler and Zach Baylin that finds Adonis (Jordan) confronting the core regret of his past — a decision that sent his best friend Damian Anderson to jail for 18 years. Out on parole and looking for the shot at boxing greatness that he never got, Dame (Majors) leans on his old, recently-retired pal for an opportunity that seems ludicrous but, thanks to Majors’ hard-nosed charisma, starts to make sense.

Precisely where that bond leads deserves to be experienced by viewers, as the screenwriting team hides its, er, punches well, allowing them to land with all their desired intensity. As Adonis navigates his new/old reality, he receives ample support from his wife Bianca (Tessa Thompson), mother Mary-Anne (Phylicia Rashad), daughter Amara (Mila Davis-Kent), and trainer Little Duke (Wood Davis), but it’s ultimately up to him to figure things out, and the way Jordan balances actor/director responsibilities would make the thankfully absent Stallone proud.

Though Creed III gets to its big finale with such breakneck speed that one wonders if a few scenes were deleted, Jordan compensates by injecting the climax with a plethora of imaginative elements, the likes of which are rarely witnessed in boxing movies.

The result is a fitting high note on which to end this, well, rocky trilogy. But if the story were to continue with Jordan directing and Stallone remaining sidelined in all active regards, it’s seemingly at last in good gloves.

Grade: B-plus. Rated PG-13. Now playing at AMC River Hills 10, Carolina Cinemark, and Regal Biltmore Grande.

(Photo: MGM)