‘Creed III’ Is a Muscular, Punishing Statement on Race in America

 

The Adonis Creed that we meet at the start of Michael B. Jordan’s Creed III isn’t yet the Creed that we know, a headstrong champion laboring in his father’s shadow. Here, he’s just 15 years old. He’s a sidekick to an older teen named Damian — “Diamond Dame,” they call him — who’s well on his way to becoming boxing’s next big thing. That changes. There’s an incident involving a gun and an assault and, eventually, the police. There’s an arrest. The details are complicated, but the result is neat. Two young black men, two separate fates, and a pair of paths that are hellbound to collide when they meet again, as they surely will. Creed III is about what happens when the adult Creed, a man on top of the world, is forced to answer for another young man’s sacrifice. Not now, when he’s 15, but many years later, when he actually has something to lose.

Michael B. Jordan resumes his role as Creed in this, his feature debut as a director. It’s a pretty satisfying movie for keeping things simple and playing most stuff straight. The story and the feelings it explores are all pretty consistent with Creed territory as we know it. Creed’s in his legend era now. He’s not a fighter anymore, but a gym owner of his own. He’s got a nice house and a beautiful family with Bianca (Tessa Thompson), including a feisty young daughter who, like her mother, is losing her hearing. Creed is more sensitive than he was when we last saw him, signing with his daughter, imparting love and life lessons, and playing house. His biggest problems are his mother’s health and a boxer under his wing who’s in need of a worthy challenge. That is, until Dame shows up. Dame, played by Jonathan Majors, has just gotten out of prison — for the crime committed way back when, when the two of them are younger. Obviously, it’d be nice if Creed helped him get back on his feet. And obviously Creed has good reason — guilt, mostly — to do it.

Nothing’s that easy. Creed III is very much a boxing movie. But it’s got a gnarled, contingent conflict at its center that’s a little too knowing for the movie not to have a little more than usual on its mind. Creed and Dame are two sides of the same coin, after all, not only because they grew up together in institutions and share troubled backgrounds, but because one of them never got free of that path and the other, Creed, was given a one-in-a-million chance. You didn’t think Dame showed up back in Creed’s life accidentally, did you? It’d be a lesser movie if he did. It’s a better one for being about exactly the conflict you think it’s about. This is the chickens coming home to roost, as the saying goes.

The conflict is like a knowing riff on the conflict from Black Panther, where the difference between T’Challa and Killmonger was in part the difference between the ones who make it and the ones left behind. There, Jordan played Killmonger: a man fueled by the rage over everything he didn’t have and couldn’t be, hellbent on taking Wakanda’s throne by force with all the will of a man who feels it’s owed him. Dame is that man now; Creed is the beknighted one, the lucky one, the one who now has to wrestle with the contingencies of that luck. Had Dame not taken the fall for them both as kids, Creed would not be Creed: he and Damian both would be getting released only now, 18 years after the fact, a free adult for the first time in their lives. Instead we get this: a prison-trained Damian who has nothing, thus nothing to lose, and anger to spare, and schemes on his mind. Majors does justice to the role by giving it more than another actor in a more rote version of this movie would have given. He’s got a strange energy at times that suits him here. For his physical prowess, he’s got a vulnerable reticence at times, an outsiderness. You believe in his fury, but you know that beating Creed won’t bring the vulnerable young man back. 

Dramatically, the movie has its highs and lows, wandering as it does through domestic and ringside scenes that tend to have more of a spark the more deeply we delve into the differences between these men. Its fight scenes work because they’re willing to get a little brutal — and the conflict that the movie sets up seems fit for that brutality. This is a fight between haves and have-nots. The movie’s onto something for noticing the fundamental wisdom of the fight between a success story and his living, breathing collateral damage. We’re obviously here to raise a few questions about racial progress. The symbolic overtones are sometimes painfully overt, but the story satisfies. Check the boxing shorts each man wears to their final fight. One of these men is wearing a white-hot riff on the American flag, laying claim to that image as if it were something he believes in. No mystery which of these men it might be; the real story, here, is the shock of a man like Creed, with his history, buying into any of it. 

But success can do that to you — that’s part of what Creed III wants to pick apart, encourage Creed to question. Damian and Creed’s reunion has some tingling discomfort for that reason, one that the actors sell very well. Majors is good at being the guy who’s been stripped of his freedom but is still polite over how lavishly you’ve been enjoying yours. Jordan is good at being the guy who’s uptight with expectation, like a man who knows he’s about to be asked a favor that he’d rather not grant but will. Figuratively, when Damian is in the room, it’s like Creed’s hand is always on his pocket — partially because a sense of guilt condemns him to expect to have to give a handout, and partially to make sure it’s still there. From the start, he senses what Damian has come here to take. 

The fact that Damian has already lost so much of his life to prison lends the kind of credence to his anger that the movie needs. It’s healthy to see Creed get a fire lit under his a**. And funny to see that the once-scrappy protégé to a grumpy Rocky Balboa is now so big that a stranger from his past can rightly accuse him of having forgotten where he came from. All Damian has to do is walk wide-eyed through Creed’s house for us to feel the pain of the gap. It’s a fault of the movie that it goes out of its way to imagine more to Damian that doesn’t quite land, a scheming pettiness, tricks up his sleeve that don’t totally work because Damian is more of a bull in a china shop than a schemer. He isn’t a villain in the usual sense, just as Killmonger wasn’t. He’s just given a few villainous qualities, as if we’d forget. 

The movie isn’t ever really hiding the mechanics of its script. All roads point to getting Creed and Damian in the ring together for one last fight, and so, even if it sometimes makes the movie make less sense, we get them there. The fight that results is worth it. Like the rest of Creed III, it’s no match for Coogler’s sculptural, satisfying finale back in 2015. It’s more workmanlike. But it’s just as dramatic: These men are beating each other’s a****. It’s fun to see Jordan play around with the brutish realism of it. He finds ways to remind us that this fight isn’t about the crowd, isn’t about the money, isn’t about reality, even. It’s about these two men: the success story and his tether, battling for dominance. There’s no way that the result of the fight can resist feeling larger than one fight. There’s a lesson in here about remembering where you come from — remembering who you owe and what you owe them. And then doing some reminding of your own, tamping down the threat as if an entire American dream were at risk. Which it is. Creed III’s solution to this problem isn’t brave or unexpected. Maybe that’s a downside. But it’s also the point.