With his rock-solid physique and thousand-yard stare, ex-con Dame Anderson (Jonathan Majors)—a one-time Gold Gloves hopeful who let the young Adonis Creed carry his gloves to tournaments—cuts the most imposing figure in the Rocky-verse in decades. Dame’s chip is more like a crater: As another character observes, “He’s fighting the world, and he’s trying to hurt somebody.” After serving 20 years in jail on a gun charge, he’s returned to the outside world looking to cave in some heads. His real specialty, though, is mind games. The first time we see him, he’s leaning against his childhood pal’s SUV, as if to indicate that it—along with all the other spoils of Donnie’s championship boxing career—belongs to him.
To be fair, Donnie’s got a nice spread, and Creed III makes the good life look pretty darn good. In making his feature directorial debut, Michael B. Jordan errs on the side of glossiness and also indulges in a bit of self-mythmaking; a shot of Donnie ending an intense training session by dancing on a mountaintop above the Hollywood sign neatly allegorizes the star’s ascent to the top of the industry A list. But as much as Creed III has been designed to give Jordan his big moments—including several tearful monologues and lots of cutesy shtick with his character’s daughter—it’s also been torqued as a showcase for Majors, an actor whose time is very much now. He’s got genuinely malevolent energy, and for the first hour or so, the story works as an odd sports-movie variation on Cape Fear, with Majors persuasively splitting the difference between James “Clubber” Lang and Max Cady. Peering out from sinisterly hooded sweatshirts, he accesses layers of shame and self-effacement, defense mechanisms that Dame’s applied to disguise his rage.
