UPDATE! Thanks to some European Chewers on our message board, we have learned that the translations making the web right now are wrong. It seems as though in the interview Stallone is talking in the past tense about Rocky Balboa and not a Rocky 7. Don’t trust Babelfish for your translations, I guess.
For my money Rocky Balboa is the second best film in the Rocky series, and I think it makes a beautiful bookend with the first film. There’s shit in between those two bookends, but Stallone started it and ended it strongly, allowing us to forgive the robots and other idiocy.
But now Sly Stallone, hellbent on pissing on his own legacy, is talking up Rocky 7. I’ve long had a theory about Sly, and I think I’m in the midst of being proven right: he can’t follow up success, and he needs to be the underdog, so he always undercuts himself whenever things are looking good. Rocky Balboa and Rambo were great, great films, and he’s already set to do a Rambo sequel… with fucking monsters. And he’s finishing up The Expendables, a PG-13 no-budget movie whose trailers have looked like the kind of DTV movies characters would watch in a really shoddy DTV movie.
So of course fucking up his perfect ending of Rocky Balboa would be right in character. At least this time Stallone knows it’s a ridiculous idea. He tells a German publication (via Cinematical, who translated): ‘I know people would laugh at it, as I would if someone were making The Godfather Part 10.
Enough! But I also know that if I succeed, it will be because this is a
film about aging, not about boxing. I know it will provoke criticism.
Even my wife said to me, Leave it. You’ll embarrass the children. But I
said, if I do not try, I an a very unfortunate man. One must do it.
Artists must go again and again through the dark.’
It’s like he doesn’t even understand Rocky Balboa, which is all about aging. So sad.
Hopefully the eventual failure of The Expendables and Rambo Meets The Wolf Man gets Sly back in a place where he can make good movies again.