Review: ‘Creed III,’ starring Michael B. Jordan, Tessa Thompson and Jonathan Majors

February 23, 2023

by Carla Hay

Michael B. Jordan, Tony Weeks and Jonathan Majors in “Creed III” (Photo by Eli Ade/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures)

“Creed III”

Directed by Michael B. Jordan

Culture Representation: Taking place in the Los Angeles area in the early 2020s (with flashbacks to 2000 and 2015), the dramatic film “Creed III” features a predominantly African American cast of characters (with some white people and Latinos) representing the working-class, middle-class and wealthy.

Culture Clash: Retired boxing champ Adonis “Donnie” Creed comes out of retirement to fight his former childhood friend Damian “Dame” Anderson, who has a jealousy-fueled vendetta against Adonis. 

Culture Audience: “Creed III” will appeal primarily to people who are fans of the “Creed”/”Rocky” franchise, the movie’s headliners, and boxing movies that show the emotional toll of keeping dark secrets and the down sides of fame and fortune.

Michael B. Jordan, Mila Davis-Kent and Tessa Thompson in “Creed III” (Photo by Eli Ade/Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures)

“Creed III” serves up more of the franchise’s winning combination of family drama, boxing fights and friendship loyalty. The movie might disappoint viewers who are expecting more boxing scenes, but Adonis Creed’s complicated past gets a worthy spotlight. Michael B. Jordan, who stars as Adonis “Donnie” Creed, makes an impressive feature-film directorial debut with “Creed III,” a movie that is the most psychologically intricate movie in the “Creed” franchise so far. Fans of boxing movies should know in advance there’s a lot more talking than boxing action in “Creed III,” which has only three big boxing matches and several flashbacks to Adonis’ childhood.

The “Creed” franchise (a spinoff from the “Rocky” movie franchise) began with 2015’s “Creed” and continued with 2018’s “Creed II.” With “Creed III,” the filmmakers (including “Creed III” screenwriters Keenan Coogler and Zach Baylin) give a lot of screen time to Adonis’ backstory to explain why he is so conflicted when a former childhood friend shows up in Adonis’ life again after the friend spent 18 years in prison. It helps (but it’s not essential) to see the previous “Creed” movies before seeing “Creed III,” because these previous movies give better context to Adonis’ relationship with his loyal wife Bianca Creed (played by Tessa Thompson) and their daughter Amara Creed (played by Mila Davis-Kent), who both happen to have hearing disabilities.

“Creed III” (which takes place in the Los Angeles area) begins with a flashback to 2000, when 15-year-old Adonis (played by as Thaddeus James Mixson Jr.) was a foster kid getting caught up in a lot of shady activities. At the time, Adonis’ best friend was 18-year-old Damian “Dame” Anderson (played by Spence Moore II), whom Adonis admired immensely. Adonis and Dame have a younger brother/older brother type of relationship. But they both run with a rough crowd and spend a lot of time doing risky, illegal activities. Dame was the first person who taught Adonis how to be a boxer.

One night, Adonis sees a middle-aged man named Leon (played by Aaron Alexander) outside of a liquor store. Dame is somewhere nearby. Leon looks intoxicated and oblivious as he walks by Adonis, as if he didn’t really see Adonis at all. Adonis angrily says to Leon, “You don’t remember me, do you?” And the next thing you know, Adonis attacks Leon and starts beating him viciously.

What happened that night is shown in other flashbacks that eventually reveal the entire story. It’s enough to say that what happened that night drastically changed the courses of Adonis’ life and Dame’s life. And it’s something that Adonis wants to forget, but he will have to face it when Dame suddenly and unexpectedly comes back into Adonis’ life, after Dame (played by Jonathan Majors) has spent 18 years in prison. Dame reconnects with Adonis the week after Dame got out of prison.

As already revealed in the “Creed III” trailer, the reunion of Adonis and Dame becomes a rekindled friendship that turns sour and leads to Adonis and Dame facing off as enemies inside and outside the boxing ring. The rift in their rekindled friendship happens about halfway through the movie. People who see the “Creed III” trailer before seeing the movie might wonder why it takes so long to get to the conflicts between Adonis and Dame.

For better or worse, “Creed” (which has a total running time of 116 minutes) takes its time in exploring issues such as urban poverty, social class prejudices, and African American male experiences in friendships, rivalries and the criminal justice system. It’s a lot of issues to cover, in addition to bringing back previous “Creed” movie characters and their storylines, introducing new characters, and showing a different side of Adonis without fundamentally changing who he is. Fortunately, the writing, directing, and film editing (by Jessica Baclesse and Tyler Nelson) of “Creed III” blend everything together in a way that’s seamless but a little long-winded.

After “Creed III” begins with flashbacks to Adonis’ life in 2000 (when he was 15 years old), the movie shows a flashback to 2015, when a 30-year-old Adonis won his first heavyweight boxing championship. In 2023, Adonis is happily retired, wealthy, and running a boxing training center called the Delphi Academy with Tony “Little Duke” Burton (played by Wood Harris), who has a shared generational history with Adonis. Little Duke was Adonis’ former cornerman, just like Little Duke’s father Duke was a cornerman for Adonis’ father Apollo Creed, Rocky Balboa’s most famous boxing competitor from 1976’s Oscar-winning “Rocky” and 1979’s “Rocky II.”

When Dame comes back into Adonis’ life, Dame makes Adonis feel guilty for Adonis not keeping in touch with Dame while Dame was in prison. Before he was sent to prison, Dame was a Golden Gloves (amateur boxing) champ, and he’s bitter that his boxing career was cut short because of his prison sentence. Now in his early 40s, Dame is considered too old to try to become a professional boxer, but he tells Adonis that it’s his goal anyway. Dame convinces Adonis to let Dame train at Delphi Academy.

Two people are very wary and skeptical about Dame being back in Adonis’ life, because they don’t think that Dame can be trusted. The first skeptic is Little Duke, who thinks that Dame is a loose cannon who fights dirty in the ring. Little Duke also thinks it’s foolish to invest time and money in Dame’s training. Dame is unemployed and broke when he gets out of prison, so Adonis is essentially paying for all of Dame’s boxing expenses.

The other person who doesn’t trust Dame is Adonis’ stepmother Mary-Anne Creed (played by Phylicia Rashad), Apollo’s widow who took 23-year-old Adonis out of a detention center in 1998 and let him live with her in her Bel-Air mansion. Adonis’ biological mother, who died when he was a child, was Apollo’s mistress. As shown in the first “Creed” movie, Mary-Anne and Adonis became so close, she began to treat him like he was her own biological son, and he eventually started calling her his mother.

Mary-Anne knows about Adonis and Dame’s shady past together, and she thinks of Dame as a bad influence, then and now. Soon after Dame and Adonis reconnect, Dame asks Adonis if Adons received any of the letters that Dame wrote to Adonis during Dame’s prison term. Adonis said he never got the letters, which were sent to the mansion where he used to live with Mary-Anne. It’s very easy to figure out what happened to those letters.

Adonis is a mentor to the current world heavyweight boxing champ: Felix Chavez (played by Jose Benavidez), who is managed by his outspoken mother Laura Chavez (played by Selenis Leyva), who is as ambitious and hard-working as her son. Felix’s biggest challenger for the heavyweight title is Viktor Drago (played by Florian Munteanu), who was Adonis’ main opponent in “Creed II.”

Viktor has a small but pivotal role in “Creed III.” Viktor, the son of notorious Ivan Drago (who fought Rocky in 1985’s “Rocky IV”) is supposed to be face off with Felix in a high-profile world heavyweight championship boxing match. However, something happens that prevents Viktor from doing this boxing match. What happens after that changes the trajectory of Dame’s boxing career and leads to the downfall of his friendship with Adonis.

Jordan (who is also a producer of “Creed III”) gives his best performance so far as Adonis in a “Creed” movie. It’s a richly layered performance that looks authentic and well-earned, after years of Jordan portraying this character. Thompson is very good in her role as Bianca, but she has a lot less to do in “Creed III” than she did in “Creed” (which showed the Adonis/Bianca courtship) and “Creed II,” which showed the early years of their marriage and the birth of Amara.

As the troubled and emotionally wounded Dame, Majors brings realistic nuances to this role that don’t make him a typical “villain” in a boxing movie. Dame is a product of his poverty-filled environment and of his personality. He can be intensely loyal, but he can be intensely vengeful. He’s also a messy cauldron of angst, pride, sadness and vulnerability. On the one hand, Dame still wants a friendship with Adonis. On the other hand, he’s jealous of Adonis, who has the fame and fortune that Dame thinks could have been Dame’s too.

Both men have used boxing as a way to cope with tough circumstances and their life problems, but the movie shows how Adonis’ status as a celebrity millionaire does not protect him from his past or how he is viewed in the world as an African American man. Adonis is a role model now, but he knows that things could have turned out very differently under other circumstances. Meanwhile, Dame’s prison record as a convicted felon automatically makes him a society outcast in some ways, by making him unable to vote and get certain jobs.

Adonis and Dame started out with similar lifestyles, but their current social class divide (and Dame’s envy about it) is shown in telling scenes. Dame and Adonis have their first reunion meal at local diner in a low-income neighborhood that the two used to frequent when they were teenagers. Dame comments to Adonis, “I’m surprised you’re still here with the common folk.”

Later, Adonis invites Dame to the mansion were Adonis lives with Bianca and Amara. Dame seems both impressed by and jealous of Adonis’s privileged and happy life. It further fuels Dame into thinking that he was robbed of having this type of life because of what happened that fateful night in 2000. Dame insists that Adonis should help Dame get a shot at winning a boxing title.

As for Amara and Bianca, they’re not exactly sidelined, but their storylines in “Creed III” are secondary to what’s going on between Adonis and Dame. Amara is a singer/musician who has successfully transitioned from being a performer to being a music producer because of her partial hearing condition. Amara mentions how painful it was for her to give up performing on stage, but her feelings about this issue are never fully explored in “Creed III.”

Amara is a lively and intelligent “daddy’s girl,” who eagerly learns how to box and takes Adonis’ self-defense advice to heart. The movie has multiple scenes of Amara doing shadow boxing training with Adonis. It all seems like a blatant set-up for a future “Creed” movie about Amara when she’s an adult and inevitably becomes a boxer. Someone call Laila Ali (daughter of Muhammad Ali) for advice.

Amara’s fight skills cause problems when Amara punches a girl classmate who bullies Amara by stealing a drawing that Amara made and ripping up the drawing in front of Amara. A parent-teacher meeting about this fight shows the different parenting styles of Adonis (who doesn’t have a problem with what Amara did) and Bianca, who does have a problem with it. Bianca feels that she has to be the parent to teach Amara that throwing punches isn’t always the best way to resolve a fight.

There’s also friction between Bianca and Adonis later in the movie, because he won’t open up and tell her all the details about what happened in the incident that landed Dame in prison. This incident is the root cause of all the hard feelings between these two on-again/off-again friends. Previous “Creed” movies only hinted at Adonis’ difficult past. “Creed III” is a deep dive into it.

Is this a psychological drama or a boxing movie? It’s both. The boxing scenes are adrenaline-packed and thrilling, of course, but “Creed III” is also concerned with showing how fame and fortune can affect relationships but can’t change the past and can’t change how people fundamentally feel about themselves. It’s a hard lesson that Adonis has to learn, even if it comes at a painful cost of having a friend turn into an enemy. “Creed III” is by no means the end of the “Creed” franchise, but it does close a chapter on Adonis’ toughest fight of reconciling his past with his present.

Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures will release “Creed III” in U.S. cinemas on March 3, 2023.

Review: ‘892,’ starring John Boyega, Nicole Beharie, Michael Kenneth Williams, Connie Britton, Jeffrey Donovan, Selenis Leyva and Olivia Washington

January 26, 2022

by Carla Hay

John Boyega in “892” (Photo by Chris Witt)

[Editor’s Note: After this movie premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, Bleecker Street acquired the movie and changed the movie’s title from “892” to “Breaking.”]

“892”

Directed by Abi Damaris Corbin

Culture Representation: Taking place primarily in Marietta, Georgia, the dramatic film “892” features a cast of African American and white characters (with a few Latinos) representing the working-class and middle-class.

Culture Clash: A former U.S. Marine, who’s an Iraq War veteran, takes hostage of a bank in order to get the $892.42 that he says the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs owes him.

Culture Audience: “892” will appeal mainly to people who are interested in suspenseful but formulaic movies with themes about how U.S. veterans are treated by the government, as well as racial inequalities in the criminal justice system.

Michael Kenneth Williams (pictured at far right) in “Breaking” (Photo courtesy of Bleecker Street)

The suspenseful drama “892” leaves some major questions unanswered, but the message of this movie is loud and clear: “The U.S. government needs to improve how military veterans are treated by the system.” John Boyega gives a riveting performance in a movie that’s sometimes hampered by hostage movie clichés, underdeveloped characters and not enough empathy for the hostage victims. “892” had its world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival.

Based on true events, “892” is the second feature film directed by Abi Damaris Corbin, who co-wrote the “892” screenplay with Kwame Kwei-Armah. The screenplay is based on Aaron Gell’s 2018 Task & Purpose article “They Didn’t Have to Kill Him.” It’s a movie that takes some shortcuts in telling a story that puts more emphasis on showing the stress and intensity of a hostage situation instead of giving a well-rounded view of the people who were directly involved in this crisis.

The movie is told mostly from the perspective of a former U.S. Marines lance corporal who takes hostage of a Wells Fargo bank in Marietta, Georgia. This Iraq War veteran is angry and frustrated that the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, also known as the VA, has withheld payment of $892.42 that he says he has a right to have. In real life, this hostage incident took place on July 17, 2017. And this distraught former military man was Brian Brown-Easley, a 33-year-old divorced father of an elementary-school-aged daughter.

Boyega portrays Brian Brown-Easley with a mixture of compassion, sorrow and ferocity in how this doomed military veteran expresses himself and interacts with the people around him. Most of the movie is told in “real time” during this bank standoff, but there are a few flashbacks that give some (but not enough) information on what led Brian to commit such a desperate act. The movie shifts perspectives mainly when it shows what’s happening outside of the bank during this standoff, as one person involved has somewhat of a breakthrough in emotionally connecting with Brian.

The beginning of the movie shows that Brian appears to be a devoted father to his daughter Kiah (played by London Covington), who’s about 6 or 7 years old. As they spend time together talking on the phone, they have a father-daughter joke about the “Lord of the Rings” villain creature Gollum and the character’s grotesque physical appearance. Brian is putting up a happy front for Kiah, but his life is really falling apart.

Brian is living in a motel, which is about to evict him for non-payment. It’s one of the reasons why Brian is so angry that he can’t get the $892.42 benefits payment that he says that the VA is wrongfully withholding from him. A flashback shown later in the movie reveals that this payment was denied to Brian because the VA was paying for Brian’s college tuition, but VA records show that he stopped attending the college, so the VA withheld payment to compensate for the college tuition. Brian insists it’s a case of mistaken identity.

About 10 minutes into the movie, Brian is shown holding the bank hostage, so viewers don’t get to know much about Brian in the beginning of the film. Brian walks into the bank while he’s carrying a backpack, and he calmly interacts with a bank teller to withdraw $25 from his bank account. He has a friendly bank teller named Rosa Diaz (played by Selenis Leyva), who is chatty and helpful. But after Brian gets his $25, he shows her a note that says, “I have a bomb.” And that’s when things take an ominous turn.

A quick-thinking bank manager named Estel Valerie (played by Nicole Beharie) notices that Rosa seems very anxious with Brian. Estel immediately figures out that some kind of robbery or threat is in progress, so she’s able to discreetly get most of the employees and all of the customers out of the bank. The bank isn’t that crowded, but it’s a bit of an “only in a movie” stretch that one person was able to do all of this so quickly without the hostage taker noticing that the bank is being evacuated.

The bank is evacuated to the point where Estel and Rosa are the only hostages during this standoff. There are repetitive scenes where Brian shouts to anyone who’ll listen some variation of this threat: “I’m going to kill myself and everybody in here if my demands are not met!”

He also insists on having Estel and Rosa call as many media outlets as possible because he wants his “mission” to get as much publicity as possible. “Fraud was committed! My disability check was stolen from me, and I want it back!” Brian shouts. Rosa and Estel both try to appease Brian by telling him that they can give him as much money as he wants from the cash in the bank. However, he adamantly refuses to accept any money that isn’t directly from the VA.

Meanwhile, just like Brian wanted, there ends up being live media coverage of the standoff, especially after Brian gets on the phone for a live conversation with WSB-TV producer Lisa Larson (played by Connie Britton), who tries to give Brian the impression that she’s on his side and wants him to safely get him what he’s demanding. Brian goes back and forth in deciding whether he can trust Lisa or not. Even though his hostage plan/bomb threat might be foolish, he’s smart enough to know that Lisa’s main agenda is to get as much out of this story as she can as a TV producer.

While all of this chaos is happening, there’s a section of the movie where the authorities and Brian have trouble reaching his ex-wife Cassandra Brown-Easley (played by Olivia Washington), who is fast-asleep (she works the night shift and is exhausted) and not answering her phone. When she does find out what’s happening, she seems curiously and inexplicably emotionally detached, which could be interpreted as shock. Viewers will get the impression that when Cassandra first hears that Brian is responsible for this hostage crisis, her attitude is, “Well, he’s my ex-husband, so he’s not my problem.”

However, Cassandra seems to already think the worst possible outcome will happen. Whenever law enforcement contacts her about Brian during this crisis, her first question is usually: “Is he dead?” This movie presents Cassandra as an ex-wife who doesn’t have much information to divulge about Brian and why he would commit these crimes.

Cassandra does have a very heavy emotional moment later when the reality of the situation sinks in, but for some parts of the movie, she doesn’t act like a mother who’s too concerned about how this crisis will affect her daughter. For example, she lets Kiah watch the TV news to see what’s happening with the standoff. You don’t have to be a parent to know that it would be very traumatic for a child to watch this type of news coverage that could end with the child seeing a parent killed or arrested on TV.

Brian seems to know that even if he does get the money that he says is owed to him, getting arrested or killed are the only two realistic outcomes for him. He doesn’t seem all that concerned about having an escape plan, because he knows it would be pointless. And what about the two women who are being held hostage? Brian assures them: “If I die today, I die alone.”

The issue of race comes up occasionally during this hostage crisis—not as as an excuse or explanation, but to show that Brian is all too-aware that because he’s African American, he’s less likely to survive law enforcement’s reaction to what he’s doing. Shortly after Estel (who is African American) and Rosa (who is Afro-Latina) are taken hostage, Brian asks Estel if the bank has been robbed before. She says yes, and the robber was arrested. Brian says, “They didn’t kill him? He got to be white.”

Unlike most hostage takers, Brian insists on having a hostage negotiator. A small army of law enforcement is stationed outside and near the bank, including members of the Marietta Police Department, the Cobb County Sheriff’s Office and the FBI. Some of them argue about who’s going to take the lead in the negotiations.

In the end, Eli Bernard (played by Michael Kenneth Williams), a sergeant with the Marietta PD, becomes the chief negotiator. Eli also happens to be an African American and a former Marine, just like Brian, so they bond over this shared identity. Eli often calls Brian “brother” and is the only one during the standoff who come closest to gaining Brian’s trust. (“892” is one of the last on-screen roles for Williams, who died of a drug overdose in 2021.)

The movie spends a lot of time trying to garner sympathy for Brian. And there’s no doubt that Boyega’s impactful performance is the main reason to watch “892.” However, all of this emphasis on Brian comes at the expense of sidelining the thoughts and feelings of all the other characters. Beharie shows some grit in her performance of Estel, who is more composed during this crisis than panic-stricken Rosa. However, Estel and Rosa are not shown as fully developed people. They’re just hostage victims who react to what Brian does and what he wants.

All the people outside of the bank are essentially the types of characters that have been in plenty of other hostage movies. Lisa is the ambitious and shrewd media person. Eli is the sympathetic “good cop.” And there’s the predictable “trigger happy” law enforcement officer Major Riddick (played by Jeffrey Donovan), who would rather have the hostage taker dead at the end of the ordeal instead of alive. The role of Major Riddick is quite generic and only in the movie so that Eli inevitably has someone to clash with over authority issues and negotiation tactics.

Even though the movie succeeds in keeping a suspenseful tone throughout, there are some inconsistencies in the storytelling. At one point in the movie, Brian is described as someone who’d never been in trouble with the law before, based on background checks that are done when he’s identified as the hostage taker. But then, there’s a flashback scene of Brian being handcuffed by police officers while he’s having a meltdown in a VA office because he can’t get his money.

Perhaps the movie’s biggest shortcoming is in how “892” avoids discussing mental health. Viewers won’t find out if Brian had a mental illness that was diagnosed or undiagnosed. And if he did have any mental illness, how long did he have it? Was he getting treatment for it? Those questions remain unanswered in the movie.

People can certainly speculate that as a war veteran, Brian might have had post-traumatic stress disorder. However, someone just doesn’t go into a bank and commit this type of horrifying act just because they want $892 from the government. Brian says he wants the media coverage to bring attention to the VA’s mistreatment of veterans, but it’s obviously illogical and wrong to try to get attention for this issue by holding innocent people hostage and threatening to blow up a building.

Details about Brian’s personal life are also not fully explained. Brian hints that he’s mainly responsible (or at least he blames himself) for his divorce from Cassandra, but the details over why they got divorced are never mentioned in the movie. Brian also says that he has an estranged brother, but his parents or other relatives aren’t even mentioned. Brian is obviously a loner, so he has no friends who can offer any insight. During this crisis, Cassandra is the only person in Brian’s family who is contacted.

All of this gives some skimpy background information that might explain why Brian felt he had no one that he could turn to for help. However, it doesn’t explain why Brian wasn’t thinking of his daughter when he committed an act that would result in Brian being taken away from her. It can be left up to interpretation that Brian subconsciously wanted a “suicide by cop” situation, but the movie doesn’t seem too interested in addressing mental health as a reason for why someone would do what Brian did. By leaving out these mental health issues, “892” could have come very close to portraying Brian as a negative and hollow stereotype of an “angry black man,” if not for Boyega’s nuanced performance.

“892” doesn’t frame Brian’s actions as a heroic “one man versus the system” story, but rather as a tragedy whose outcome probably would have been different if Brian had been white. There are moments in the movie where Brian seems to understand that his irreversible actions will cause a lot of emotional damage to his daughter Kiah. However, those moments are few and far in between, because the movie is mainly concerned about making Brian the person who should get the most sympathy in this tragedy. It’s debatable whether or not all of that sympathy is deserved.

Another shortcoming in “892” is how the movie has a trivial way of showing the traumas that Estel and Rosa have to deal with after the standoff is over. As a hostage thriller, “892” certainly delivers when it comes to creating tension-filled scenes. Some of the scenarios seem too contrived for a movie though, just for the sake of dragging out the story so that Brian can get more agitated and start yelling again. It’s the type of hostage film where the movie’s message is made very clear, but viewers still won’t know much about the hostage taker when the movie is over.

UPDATE: Bleecker Street will release “Breaking” (formerly titled “892”) in U.S. cinemas on August 26, 2022.

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