Rocky IV (1985)

Preceded by: Rocky III (1982)
Succeeded by: Rocky V (1990)

	Director: Sylvester Stallone	COUNTRY USA GENRE Drama/Sports NORWEGIAN TITLE Rocky IV RUNNING TIME 91 minutes
	Producer: Irwin Winkler Robert Chartoff
	Screenwriter: Sylvester Stallone

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Rocky Balboa	Sylvester Stallone
Adrian	Talia Shire
Paulie	Burt Young
Apollo Creed	Carl Weathers	½
Ludmilla Vobet Drago	Brigitte Nielsen
Captain Ivan Drago	Dolph Lundgren

Review

This is where the Rocky series turned camp. With its dichotomic setup of East vs West, modern vs traditional, synthetic vs organic, it simplifies and pigeonholes ad nauseum. This time around, Rocky and his team come up against the modern, scientifically built Soviet fighter Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren), who first entices a suddenly inexplicably arrogant Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) to a catastrophic bout, and then invites Rocky to the Soviet Union for the ultimate patriotic showdown behind the Iron Curtain. As writer/director Stallone hammers on with his increasingly assembly-line film series, you're painfully aware of the driving forces at play before your eyes. The training montages that Rocky helped popularise are cranked up to eleven this time, all the while contrasting the ‘machine’ Drago training in his laboratory with the ‘human’ Rocky training in harmony with nature. Still, there’s no denying camp can be fun, and so can watching a Swede and a Dane pretend to be proponents for Soviet nationalism. IV certainly isn’t the subtlest of the Rockys, but it does have the most bombastic tropes. And yes, it’s cheesily effective at times.