John G. Avildsen's return to the franchise opens with Rocky emerging from the Drago fight visibly diminished, his hands trembling, his speech slurred, the physical cost of his career written across his body. It is the series' most honest opening image since the original, and it sets up a film with genuinely interesting ambitions. Rocky V is a noble failure: the commendable conceptual goals are clear throughout, but the execution is not equal to them.
At a Glance
Director: John G. Avildsen
Runtime: 104 minutes
Starring: Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire, Burt Young, Sage Stallone, Tommy Morrison
Release: 1990
Critics Rating: ★★ (2/5 stars, well-intentioned but unsuccessful)
Audience Rating: ★★ (2/5 stars, the series' low point)
Plot
Returning from the Soviet Union with brain damage sustained in the Drago fight, Rocky discovers that his accountant has stolen his fortune and that he and Adrian must return to the old neighbourhood with nothing. Rocky takes on a young fighter named Tommy Gunn as a protege, investing in him the attention and energy that his own son feels he is being denied. When Tommy is seduced away by a corrupt promoter and publicly humiliates Rocky, the film resolves its conflict with a street fight that is the series' least coherent conclusion. The narrative's emotional anchor, the relationship between Rocky and his son Robert, is handled with genuine tenderness, but the Tommy Gunn subplot overwhelms it, and the resolution contradicts the narrative's own stance against senseless conflict.
Characters
Stallone plays the character's diminishment with a conviction and vulnerability the film around him does not always deserve, and his scenes with his real-life son Sage, playing Rocky's son Robert, have a warmth and specificity that give the picture its most grounded passages. The relationship between Rocky and Robert is the film's structural problem: it is the more compelling story, and the film consistently abandons it in favour of the less interesting one. Tommy Morrison's Tommy Gunn is a character of adequate physical presence and almost no depth whose arc from protege to antagonist is handled with a superficiality that makes his betrayal feel like a plot convenience rather than a credible development.
Meaning / Themes
The core thematic inquiry is the question of what Rocky is without boxing, of how a man defines himself when the thing that defined him has been taken away. The parallel between Rocky's investment in Tommy and his neglect of Robert is the picture's most coherent dramatic statement, a suggestion that the hunger to mentor is itself a displacement of the hunger to fight, and that Rocky cannot escape his identity even when the ring has been closed to him. The failure to resolve this theme with any dramatic intelligence is the picture's central creative problem, a missed opportunity that leaves the film's most interesting ideas stranded without a conclusion worthy of them. Rocky's speech to Robert about personal responsibility is the film's most direct scene, and it points toward the more psychologically serious territory that Rocky Balboa would eventually explore.
Direction
Avildsen's direction is more grounded and patient than Stallone's work on the middle entries, with a stronger command of the domestic sequences. The South Philadelphia sequences evoke the texture and visual language of his 1976 original with a care and specificity that suggests Avildsen understood what the series had lost. The street fight climax is the film's directorial failure, a sequence that abandons the more interesting concerns in favour of a populist resolution the film's own thematic logic cannot support. Bill Conti's score returns with a warmth and familiarity that suits the more grounded register. Rocky V was a commercial disappointment on its release and the series' most critically dismissed entry to that point. Its reputation has not improved significantly since, and it is now most frequently discussed as the series' low point and as the creative miscalculation that made Rocky Balboa's eventual rehabilitation of the character feel necessary. There is, however, a minority critical view that the film's ambitions deserve more credit than its execution receives, and that the Rocky and Robert storyline represents a genuinely interesting direction the franchise chose not to pursue.
Final Verdict: The series' most ambitious sequel and its least successful. The Rocky and Robert storyline is the series' most interesting dramatic concern since the original, Stallone's performance is as committed as ever, and Avildsen's return to the franchise's realist roots is admirable in intention. But the Tommy Gunn subplot overwhelms the more interesting material, the street fight climax contradicts the film's own thematic concerns, and Rocky V ends as a film that understood what it wanted to be and could not find the means to become it.