Creed III’s Replacement Theory

The complete genre makeover of Creed III (replacing the Sylvester Stallone Rocky franchise) is symbolized when Adonis Creed (played by Michael B. Jordan) comes out of comfortable retirement and trains for a rematch. The Rocky-esque workout montage — running, boxing, weight-lifting, sweating — climaxes with Adonis standing atop the Los Angeles hills, above the famous Hollywood sign, his arms raised in victory and roaring his comeback.

So this is essentially a story about Hollywood. The details of Adonis competing against a friend from his past, ex-con and failed Golden Gloves contender Damian “Dame” Anderson (played by Jonathan Majors), are just adversarial gimmicks needed for the idea of black struggle. As youths, Adonis and Dame were subject to the traps of the urban ghetto; as adults, they remain scared by those challenges.

But the fact of black success is already established by Adonis’s bourgeois status — living with his wife and daughter in an awesome mansion, plus his post-boxing entrepreneurship as the owner of a community gym. His lavish trappings rival Jay-Z’s luxury, yet, when convenient, the entertainment industry denies the evidence of black advancement.

Creed III uses Rocky’s bootstrap-uplift formula while still perpetuating the threat of black pathology. This is the real neoliberal and neocon replacement theory. “Everyone likes an underdog,” Dame tells Adonis, but his nefarious intention exposes Hollywood’s exploitative motive. Instead of passing the Rocky myth on to the next ethnic group — Latino Alex (Jose Benavidez) is an up-and-comer at Adonis’s gym — Creed III keeps Adonis an ideological cripple on the Democratic Party plantation.

It won’t do to review Creed III casually, as if it were just another Marvel product. The fact that Jordan could escape the fakelore of Marvel’s Black Panther (in which he played the scene-stealing Killmonger) and then make his directing-acting debut with Creed III is proof that Hollywood itself is a ghetto trap.

Imprisoned by industry formula, Jordan cannot rise above its patronizing clichés. Ryan Coogler, who directed the first Creed, seems similarly stymied — mistaking the phony Afrocentricity of Blank Panther: Wakanda Forever for some kind of progress. Coogler forgot that the excitement of Jordan’s Killmonger was his physical, erotic presence, tied to the appeal of black male anger. But that’s where Coogler froze. Instead of dramatizing the frustrations of a ghettoized, dog-eat-dog worldview, Black Panther fell into a simplistic villain/hero conflict between bad-boy Killmonger and good-guy T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman).

Jordan repeats that cliché with Adonis and Dame, getting no deeper into black male anger, pathos, and defeat than a Samuel L. Jackson caricature. Both Jordan and Majors are spectacular physical specimens, but, unfortunately, the latter often looks sad, sleepy, and pathetic. Dame’s envy of Adonis (“seeing someone living your life”) turns predatory.

For a quick second, Adonis’s gym partner Duke (Wood Harris, unforgettable in Charles Stone III’s Paid in Full) sizes up Dame: He’s “fighting the world, and he’s trying to hurt somebody.” Adonis rejects this warning; Jordan’s boxing-movie formula takes over and stifles the revelation. Black class disparity (memorably enacted by Denzel Washington and Jeffrey Wright in Jonathan Demme’s Manchurian Candidate) never gets a galvanizing portrayal where Adonis and Dame “see themselves,” thus seeing past a specious contemporary bromide that promotes racial identity over common humanity.

Didn’t anyone connected to Creed III (perhaps screenwriters Keenan Coogler or Zach Baylin) recognize that the film’s opening sequence, in which youngsters Adonis and Dame enter a secret location to participate in what looks like an undercover fighting match, alarmingly resembles the infamous “Battle Royale” described in Ralph Ellison’s landmark 1952 novel Invisible Man? The suggestion that black-owned businesses now control an exploitative industry (once run by whites) betrays the insight of Ellison’s great metaphor. What’s missing is Ellison’s haunting representation of the self-annihilating antagonism among black men — the culturally induced black-on-black crime that he saw as inherent to the reality of racism. Creed III forsakes Ellison’s apparently unfilmable book to glorify Adonis/Jordan’s success. Even boxing-movie fans should see this as betrayal.