When it comes to spin offs, sequels series, or reboots, often times, those movies do not come close to being as good as the originals. With Star Wars, while I like both the prequel trilogy and the sequel trilogy so far, they don’t even come close to being as good as the original trilogy, because they don’t have the heart of the originals. The Fantastic Beasts series is really good so far, but it hasn’t measured to the Harry Potter series. The only movie series that I can think of that can possibly measure up to the original is the Creed series. This is going to a review of the Creed II. So Creed II is the second installment in the Creed movie series which is a spinoff of the Rocky movie series. It takes place three years after the first movie and is centered around a fight between Adonis Creed and Victor Drago, Ivan Drago’s son. As usual, I’m going to give what I liked about the movie and what I disliked. There will some spoilers in here and this is your only warning.

There were a lot of things I liked about this movie. Michael B. Jordan is just as good as he was in the first one. He really portrays Adonis very well. Not only does he look like Apollo, but he has taken in some of his personality but in a more humbling way. The scenes with him and Victor Drago were intense. You can just see that Adonis wanted revenge for his father’s death. The fights were intense as always, and very brutal. After the first fight, Adonis had to do some major physical therapy due to broken ribs rupturing his kidney. Tessa Thompson who plays Bianca is also great. She reminds me Adrian a little bit, meaning despite of what happened during and after the fight, she still stuck around and supported him through his struggle. One of the more emotional parts of the movie is where they find out that their daughter was born deaf basically. Tessa did really great I think portraying a situation like as accurate as she could. Florian Munteanu did a great job portraying Drago’s son. At the beginning you kind of hate because he’s Drago’s son and basically has the same personality as his father. At the end of the movie during the last fight, he sees his mother leaving after being knocked down and you can see the pain in his face from that and you can’t help but feel sorry for him. This is where Ivan comes in. Dolph Lundgren did a great job portraying a broken Ivan Drago. After his losing fight with Rocky in Rocky IV, he was kicked to the curb by his own country and even his own wife left him and Victor. So since then, Ivan’s goal was to get all of that back and that’s why he set up a fight between Adonis and Victor. During the second fight after his ex wife leaves the fight and then seeing Adonis wail on his son, he throws the towel because his son was all he had left and he wasn’t going to lose him too. Now let’s talk about Sylvester Stallone. This dude is just a great actor. A lot of people see him as an action star, but when it comes down too it, he’s better in drama situations. One of my favorite parts of the movie is at the end where he reunites with his son Robert. Besides that, if you’ve seen the Rocky movies then you what I’m talking about. This movie has a lot of great stuff going for it and there’s honestly not much not so good things in here.

The only complaints I have about this movie is the fact that they deleted some great scenes. There was a scene where Rocky and Drago fight at a hospital. There’s also a scene where Victor and Ivan make amends with Adonis and Rocky. None of this hurts the movie in any major way, but I think if they included it, the movie would have been near perfect.

Overall, I thought the movie was great. Not quite as good as the first but still pretty close. One of things I love about these movies is that it brings back the heart of the Rocky movies and a lot sequel series don’t do that today. Plus, if you’re a fan of Rocky IV you’ll definitely like this movie.

Rating: 9.5/10