Sylvester Stallone’s radical re-cut of Rocky IV shows his deep passion for the franchise

This look at Sylvester Stallone’s director’s cut of Rocky VI was originally published in 2021, when the new edit was released. It has been updated and republished in conjunction with the new interest in the Rocky series — and particularly Stallone’s place in it — following Creed III.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with Rocky IV, a film of ultra-commercialized 1980s beauty. Sylvester Stallone savvily capitalized on the anti-Russian swagger of Rambo: First Blood Part II to bring Western audiences a crowd-pleasing Cold War underdog story. The enemy: Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), the Soviet Union’s pulverizing, pugilistic savior. “Whatever he hits, he destroys,” Drago’s ashtray-voiced handler brags. When the Russian kills Rocky’s former-adversary-turned-best-friend Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) in an exhibition match, it’s clear he’s got an all-American knuckle supper coming, and Stallone serves it up with loads of the MTV flash that was in vogue at the time.

Rocky IV is a significant film of its era. Nine movies into the franchise, it’s still the highest-grossing entry of the lot. It’s no one’s favorite Rocky movie, but no one in the history of the world has ever started watching it and turned it off. This is a scientifically proven fact. And it is a truth universally acknowledged that not a single person on the planet has ever been in want of a director’s cut.

Except for Stallone.

Given its remarkably slender narrative of 91 minutes, Rocky IV is more training montage than movie. So when Stallone announced his plan for an extended director’s cut, the notion sounded like grist for an SNL Digital Short. But the actor-director was deathly serious, and now, so is Rocky IV. This once-gaudy touchstone of ’80s cinema has been transformed into a strangely grim rumination on the warrior’s code. Visually and tonally, it’s a radically different experience. And let’s get this straight: those “42 minutes of new footage” promised in the press announcement are in there, but at 93 minutes (with credits), it also means a third of the movie that’s been a cable mainstay since the beginning of the glasnost era is gone. This is not your bearded Gen X uncle’s Rocky IV.

Image: MGM Pictures

The original Rocky turned Stallone into a global superstar. It won the 1976 Academy Award for Best Picture over Network, All the President’s Men, and Taxi Driver. The sequels were all snapshots of Stallone’s career at the moment they were made: Rocky II is about an overnight success struggling with the demands of sudden fame; Rocky III contends with the loss of hunger that afflicts champions/stars at the top of their game; Rocky V charts the champion’s inevitable decline; Rocky Balboa refutes F. Scott Fitzgerald’s contention that there are no second acts in American life; and the Creed trilogy deals with the importance of legacy. But Rocky IV really isn’t about much of anything.

Apollo and Rocky are staring down impending retirement, but the former’s intimated fears of Russia taking over the boxing world with laboratory-created supermen run roughshod over any kind of meaningful introspection. There’s a touch of the John Henry folk legend in there, but at its core, it’s a revenge flick leavened by some saccharine lip service about Americans and Russians learning to view each other as fellow human beings (which the entire politburo stands up and cheers at the film’s conclusion).

So is Stallone’s recut version, Rocky IV: Rocky vs. Drago, an improvement? In several cases, absolutely. As depicted in a re-making-of documentary available on YouTube, Stallone is aghast at the number of badly missed punches that made it into the 1985 theatrical cut. He’s proud of the final fight’s ferociousness (as he should be, considering that a series of flush Lundgren punches to his chest left him with a swollen heart that landed him in the ICU), but in today’s blown-up HD world, those occasional whiffs are glaringly obvious. In the recut, almost every punch lands with a realistic thud, although some of the absurdly jacked-up sound design has actually been dialed down.

Stallone has also gone back and inserted numerous alternate takes that completely alter Apollo Creed’s tragic arc. Taking on Drago is no longer an act of stupid hubris, but an obligation, which is made clear in Duke’s eulogy, where Creed’s trainer and default father eloquently defends his fighter’s fatal decision: “The Warrior has the right to choose his way of life and his way of death.”

This echoes a newly added moment in Creed’s fight with Drago, where Rocky pleads with his friend, “Don’t do this to me.” “I’m doing this for me,” snaps Apollo. This gives Rocky’s inevitable bout with Drago a deeper purpose than vengeance; he, too, is obeying the warrior’s code, and he doesn’t care if everyone, even his loving wife Adrian (Talia Shire), believes it’s an act of suicide.

Source: Polygon