CREED II: If There’s Poetry In Boxing…
SOUTHPAW, written by Kurt Sutter of the successful, long-running show Sons of Anarchy, came out in July of 2015. Ryan Coogler’s CREED, co-written with Aaron Covington, released four months later of the same year. Before seeing either of them, I expected to enjoy Creed but like Southpaw better, aesthetically. I have always been a huge fan of the Rocky series, but I was more recently a fan of Sons, so there, admittedly, was bias filled in my assumption that went beyond my reaction to their inaugural trailers. I was wrong, it turned out. Southpaw, though I loved it and still do, was, well, written by a television writer and felt like it. This is not to say it was bad by any measure, but the emotional beats bordered a bit much on the grandiose. And while this is great for a show with the breathing room of a serial, as a device it was constricted by the tight conventions of cinema and in the movie registered as ..depressing.
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