Review Detail

Having never seen the original film all the way through but hearing horror stories, I thought it’d be better for my sanity to watch a fanedit of this one that had the intention of making it better. They’ve replaced a hip hop score with one that reflects the original films. And the fact that this film originally had a hip hop score shows how misguided some of the decisions were.
Yet honestly, it’s not entirely misguided, with the third and fourth film they had turned into fun but formulaic films that resembled music videos and lost quite a bit of the character drama that made the original film such a masterpiece. Rocky V tries to return to that, there’s a lot of interesting ideas in here, the brain damage, the corruption of the boxing leagues, the mentorship, and of course Rocky having to balance his familial duties and return to his masculinity and purpose. Yet it’s just not well written, feeling forced rather than a natural progression of the story. I know the final fight is often criticized because people wanted a boxing match in an arena,, yet I enjoyed the street fight as something different, a small personal victory rather than one that’s in front of the whole world. Thankfully all the missteps would be corrected in the next film, yet this film almost feels necessary as at least an explanation of why Rocky lost all his money.

As for the fanedit itself, Excellent Audio and Video Editing throughout. A lot of excellent choices here, the film certainly improves in it's shorter runtime and the more nostalgic score. There's one narrative hiccup that bothers me, as Rocky's son as an artist comes out of left field and we don't get the build up to that before the end.