Rocky III

Rocky III (1982) is about what a man loses once he is champion, and it permanently changed the tone of the series. Rocky is rich and famous. He shoots commercials, fights easy opponents, and has forgotten the fear of losing. Then a man called Clubber Lang appears. Lang is hungry and Rocky is not. Rocky loses the first fight. In the second half his old opponent Apollo Creed trains him. That is the best idea in the series: two former enemies on the same side. Mr. T, who plays Clubber Lang, was not an actor. Stallone saw him on a television contest to find the toughest bouncer and gave him the part. The wrestler Thunderlips in the opening bout is Hulk Hogan. He was not yet a major name and the role widened his audience. The music story is well known. Stallone used a Queen track as a temporary edit and, unable to license it, asked a band called Survivor to write something similar. What they produced has outlasted the film. Stallone went through a serious physical change here, and the look of the series shifted from this point on. The fights are showier and less realistic than in the earlier films. It runs 99 minutes. Good for: boxing films, the eighties, and followers of the series. Less good for: the first film's realism is entirely gone; everything is large and overstated.