‘Rocky IV’ at 40: the greatest bad movie ever made?
Let’s face it, Rocky IV is not a good movie by any conventional metric. And yet, it’s arguably the most popular entry in the never-ending franchise, no mean feat considering the saga now spans six Sylvester Stallone-led flicks and a trio of Michael B Jordan-fronted spinoffs.
Is it a well-directed film? Not really. The boxing scenes are as riveting as you’d expect from a series that made its name depicting bone-jarring pugilism that isn’t necessarily going to win any points for originality, but anything that takes place outside of the ring is staged in a standard, unexciting, and workmanlike fashion.
Is it a well-written film? Again, not really. There are a couple of iconic soundbites, with Ivan Drago’s “I must break you” and “If he dies, he dies” at the top of the list, but despite being an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, Stallone’s touch for natural dialogue and anything that isn’t ham-handed had long since deserted him.
Did it bask in the warm glow of critical adulation? It did not, with Rocky IV winning five Razzies for ‘Worst Actor’, ‘Worst Director’, and ‘Worst Musical Score’, with Brigitte Nielsen pulling off a double when she claimed the prizes for ‘Worst Supporting Actress’ and ‘Worst New Star’, and the only reason it didn’t win ‘Worst Picture’ was because Stallone beat himself to the punch thanks to Rambo: First Blood Part II.
Was Stallone happy with it? Since he re-edited the picture into Rocky IV: Rocky vs. Drago, added and removed several key scenes, including that damned robot butler, SICO, and repeatedly admitted he wished he’d never killed off Carl Weathers’ Apollo Creed, it seems fair to say that he wasn’t thrilled.
And yet, as you’ll surely agree, Rocky IV is fucking glorious. Yes, it’s lacking on almost every front, from its direction to the performances via the screenplay and its obsessively jingoistic Americana that flirts vicariously with being a full-blown Cold War-era propaganda film, but the overpowering scent of cheese filtering out of its every filmic pore is exactly why it’s become such a rewatchable cult favourite.
Any movie that involves James Brown strutting around in his star-spangled finest before a man gets punched to death in a boxing ring can’t be anything less than entertaining, never mind Stallone’s mountain-set montage being the most laughably macho, ridiculously overblown, and altogether fist-pumping one of the lot, which is saying something when Rocky thrived on its pre-match warmup sequences.
It even ends with the titular fighter trying to single-handedly end the Cold War, which is preposterous in itself when a crowd who’ve just watched a man get the shit kicked out of them by one of their own before pulling off an underdog upset pleads that the world would be a much better place were the simmering, nonviolent conflict to end, which is hard to take seriously when his face looks like a dropped lasagne.
If viewed in the context of motion picture excellence, Rocky IV is terrible. However, as a pure, unbridled, unfiltered, and delightfully over-the-top exercise in crowd-pleasing entertainment, it’s one of the best the 1980s had to offer. Is it the greatest bad movie of all time? It’s an oxymoronic accolade, but it’s hard to think of any pretenders who could step into the ring with the fourth instalment and take it 12 rounds.
