Rocky is back again and must get ready for one more bloody match against a towering Soviet athlete, Drago who beat his bossom friend, Apollo to death in an exhibition match. Rocky has to train hard to avenge his friend against the computer trained vicious boxer.
This is grim and witless storytelling, and what makes it so depressing is that it hasn't improved by so much as a chemical trace since the days of the first Rocky.
Whatever charm and grit there was in the first film is gone, replaced with a glossed up, over the top form of 1980's action melodrama, which is thick on the cheese and even thicker on the montages. And this critic loved every minute of it.
'Rocky IV' still stands, not as a highlight of the series (certainly not that) but as a quintessential artifact of mid-'80s studio filmmaking: soulless, flag-waving, soundtrack-blasting Product.
The crazed flag-waving would be a lot easier to take if it weren't so clearly a commercial calculation meant to salvage what is otherwise a crass, careless, shamelessly padded film.
Though it's impossible not to get caught up in our hero's Russian training programme, or to root for his climactic victory, the mawkish montages accompanied by blaring music are no substitute for plot shading.
Sylvester Stallone is really sloughing it off shamelessly in Rocky IV, but it's still impossible not to root for old Rocky Balboa to get up off the canvas and whup that bully one more time.
Padded with clips from earlier Rocky pictures, adding nothing to his mythic, let alone human dimensions, it lacks even the primitive suspense and crude capacity to release underdog emotions that permitted its predecessors to conquer one's better judgment.
