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When Rocky Saved Christmas, Or Looking Back At "Rocky IV"

Rocky Balboa took on some difficult opponents, but in the ultra-Reaganized "Rocky IV," he had to beat an invincible Russian, defeat Communism, AND save Christmas.
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The holidays and sports movies don't really mix. While Super Bowl Sunday has become a sort of secular Christmas during which everyone gets best-in-class towing power and erectile dysfunction drugs under the tree, and the other major championships secular Hannukahs and Kwanzaas, few sports movies happen to take place during the December holidays. Which is a shame, given how much more interesting Angels In The Outfield might have been if it was set in the Dominican Winter League.

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A key outlier here is Rocky IV, the 1985 megahit in which Sylvester Stallone loses a friend and gains the admiration of the Eastern Bloc. Other Rocky movies, namely the first and fifth films, have key scenes that take place on Christmas, but both reserve the climactic ass-kicking sequences for later in the winter. If you want the greatest Christmas Day film evisceration since the Bumpus hounds destroyed The Old Man's turkey, you have to go with Rocky IV.

Read More: Looking Back At Rocky V, The Movie That Nearly Knocked Out A Beloved Franchise

A vast majority of viewers (myself included) first watched Rocky IV after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Would I have liked it as much if I was born in 1954 instead of 1984, and first watched it in theaters when it debuted thirty years ago? Probably not, but Rocky IV is the movie I often pretend the original Red Dawn, or Chuck Norris' Invasion U.S.A. to be—one whose reactionary politics I can set aside for an hour and a half and just enjoy for its pure, delirious camp value. Moreover, Rocky IV saved the franchise for me, after Rocky V made my six-year-old self question why these movies were so popular in the first place.

Rocky IV treats beginnings like The Lord Of The Rings treated its endings, with no fewer than four distinct opening scenes within the first ten minutes. We get two Jeff Koons-esque boxing gloves exploding when they touch each other, followed by the end of Balboa's fight against Clubber Lang in Rocky III. This is followed in quick succession by the Balboa/Creed sparring session at the end of III, Paulie's birthday party (and the introduction of his robot/life partner), and the token non-sexual bedroom scene between Rocky and Adrian. Eight minutes in, we are finally shown Chekhov's Boxer, Ivan Drago.

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Dolph Lundgren is Ivan Drago, the really tall, really muscular ideal of Aryan Swedish Soviet supremacy. Like our Popeye, Drago eats his spinach and takes his PEDs. Unlike our Popeye, he has a 2,400 psi punch, akin to the power of a pressure washer. He comes to America with his hot, non-nonthreatening wife Ludmilla (Brigitte Nielsen) and his less attractive, equally threatening promoter, hoping for an exhibition match with heavyweight champion Rocky Balboa. Apollo Creed, having seen Ivan Drago on television, decides to face his fear of getting old, in the form of the stupendously buff star of Red Scorpion (and the upcoming direct-to-video classic Kindergarten Cop 2).

And so The Master Of Disaster, The King Of Sting, The Count Of Monte Fisto, Fortune Dane himself Apollo Creed gets himself in a fight against Ivan Drago. Creed has been struggling with his mortality throughout act one of the film, and chooses instant death rather than a slow decline. If you're going to die, there are far worse ways to do it than immediately after dancing with James Brown to "Living In America." The shoulder shrugs that Rocky and Adrian exchange during all this are perhaps my favorite Adrian moment since the original.

Nobody but Apollo Creed thinks this fight is a good idea, and needless to say, things do not go well. Rocky, Duke, and Paulie are decked out in that most American of brands, Hugo Boss, and they and ring announcer Leroy Neiman can only look in horror as Creed (spoiler alert?) is beaten to death by Drago. The death of a beloved fictional boxing legend is far from the worst tragedy to befall the original MGM Grand/MGM.aspx), but it's certainly the one that spawned the most GIFs of Tony Burton going out of his mind. Also of note is that the Drago/Creed fight still gets second billing on the MGM Grand marquee, right under the incomparable Wayne Newton.

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There is a lot of filler, here, even by the prevailing standards for '80s action film bloat. This includes no fewer than three full-blown montages of very good quality, not including the fight itself. The use of Robert Tepper's "No Easy Way Out" works well to turn a movie that was largely about Apollo Creed into one about Rocky Balboa. Once Team Balboa enters the USSR, we get two separate training montages, with the reunion of Rocky and Adrian sandwiched in between. If I had to train for a fight, and could either use what was around me in a Soviet dacha, or have complete access to an elite IMG Academy-style indoor facility, where governmental praise and anabolic steroids were at my disposal, I'd probably go with the latter. This is one of the many reasons why I was never a heavyweight champion, though—Rocky chops wood, climbs mountains, and military presses ox-carts to get in the shape of his life. In getting ready to fight Ivan Drago, he kind of accidentally invents Crossfit.

All this leads up to the greatest secular miracle ever to have occurred on Christmas Day. Ivan Drago is built up in Moscow/Vancouver as a real god, and a nifty banner with his likeness puts the banner of Balboa in the original Rocky to shame. Paulie motivates his brother-in-law by saying he wishes to unzip himself and get inside of him, a horrifying sentiment that he immediately takes back once Rocky gets in the ring. When Rocky gets disoriented and sees triple in the early rounds, "hit the one in the middle" becomes about as sound advice as he's ever going to get. Rocky and Drago fight a long, tough battle, accompanied by the Fairlight synthesizer stylings of Vince DiCola, and by round 15 the crowd is cheering for Balboa. Rocky wins by knockout before it can go to a decision, because leaving anything in the hands of Russian judges is not a very good idea.

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Immediately after a fight in which he damages his freaking brain, Rocky eloquently posits that "two men killing each other in the ring is a lot better than twenty million." Which is correct, in that twenty million people in a single boxing ring would be a logistical nightmare. Rocky wins, Brigitte Nielsen has a child with Mark Gastineau, and everyone outside the Creed family is happy, at least until Sly's stab at socialist realism in the fifth movie.

Sylvester Stallone wrote and directed Rocky IV, and while the movie mostly feels as if it were on autopilot, the moments that stick out really stick out. Stallone's performance here might be his most shallow in the series, but it works with the type of movie he's trying to make. I like Carl Weathers very much, but a lot of his dialogue, especially the one-liners Apollo gives in the press conference, feels forced. Weathers does much better when he talks man-to-man with Rocky about the twilight of his career.

The Paulie Factor is very strong in Rocky IV. Burt Young enters the frozen tundra that is Wyoming-pretending-to-be-Russia wearing a Philadelphia Eagles toque and a coat bedecked with an NRA patch and a Gadsden Flag. Paulie is nowhere near as self-pitying as he was in Rocky or Rocky III, and even though his politics would make him a perfect running mate for Donald Trump, he works great as comic relief. Sometimes it takes the love of a robot originally designed to treat autism in children to soften a man.

Michael Pataki was an underrated character actor, and he gives a memorable performance as Koloff, the Soviet Bill Belichick. David Lloyd Austin made a nice little career out of playing Mikhail Gorbachev that started with Rocky IV, although his IMDB resume is also padded with bit parts in Vancouver-based TV shows. James "Cannonball" Green, a middleweight fighter from the 1930's who also appeared in the classic boxing movie Golden Boy, plays the Cuban trainer whose presence on the Soviet side has perplexed many a great man.

Just after Thanksgiving, I watched Creed, a film whose critical praise and box office success are more than justified. After the fulfilling experience that was Creed—a boxing movie with Rocky Balboa in it that is also an actual movie—Rocky IV feels especially flimsy; Creed makes a point of mentioning just how much of a dick Rocky was in distancing himself from the Creed family after Apollo's death, although Rocky IV barely seems to notice it. If Rocky IV was a slight disappointment upon rewatching, it may be that most films lose their luster after a dozen or so viewings, even ones in which Sylvester Stallone ends Communism.