Rocky Balboa

I can count the number of movies I see in a year on one hand, but I saw Rocky Balboa tonight, and I really liked it.

While the fight scenes were well done, I especially enjoyed the character development, particularly Rocky's relationships with Paulie and his son. I will probably buy this movie because of the speech he gives to his son.

It had some funny and corny moments and it does not have a lot of the show and pizazz that most films do. It is a clean and simple movie, and overall it was very good because of its solid themes about friendship, family loyalty, struggling with loss, helping the less fortunate, the value of humility, finishing unfinished business, honoring our elders, and personal responsibility--just to name a few.

Finally, notice where Rocky is pointing in the picture above. It is not overtly Christian, but the undertones are there with clear Christian themes, as well as a paraphrase of Zechariah 4:6 before he goes out to fight. His fighting career begins and ends with Jesus (on the mural in Rocky and in name before the fight here) as Rocky is a Christ-figure according to Sylvester Stallone himself (I wonder if there's anything to the parallelism of both "Jesus Christ" and "Rocky Balboa" having 5 letters and than 6?).

In the end, I thought it was a fitting conclusion to the Rocky character, something that was really needed for such an epic film icon (especially after Rocky V). If you get a couple hours (1:42 to be exact) I highly recommend it.