Creed III Lands a Punch
A great fighter has to be willing to learn new moves, and Creed III shows that Michael B. Jordan is up to the challenge—this time behind the camera as well as in front of it.
Creed III marks Jordan’s directorial debut, and it’s an impressive one. While the plot carries few real twists, Jordan’s technical vision is demonstrated immediately in the dark, hazy opening of the movie, but nowhere is his skill sharper than in the kinetic shooting and pacing of the fights. Both in and out of the ring, Creed III indicates that Jordan has a real acuity as a director.
In front of the screen, Jordan is just as busy. Adonis Creed is no longer the world’s reigning champ, but that doesn’t mean he’s out of the limelight. He still spends most of his free time at the gym, but now he’s training the next phenom. Except things don’t always work out neatly, as Creed discovers when he runs into Dame (Jonathan Majors), an old friend recently released from prison. Adonis and Dame grew up together, suffered together through foster care, and even became invested in boxing together—Dame was a rising young star in the ring—before a fateful arrest separated the two of them.
Dame’s looking to make up for lost time, especially in his boxing career, and Creed has both the resources and the guilt that Dame’s looking for. As they reconnect, Dame’s murky intentions materialize into something cruel, threatening the calm life that Creed has built with Bianca (Tessa Thompson) and their daughter, Amara (Mila Davis-Kent). With Dame’s myopic sense of vengeance and aggression, it’s clear that there’s only one way for Creed to set things right.
The invigorating addition of Jordan behind the camera is matched by the addition of Majors. Majors flaunts Dame’s imposing presence, but he also taps into a playful camaraderie that keeps Creed and us on our heels. Dame is undoubtedly cut from the same cloth as Max Cady in Cape Fear, but that’s a tough assignment: Robert Mitchum and Robert DeNiro, who both played Cady in different versions, are formidable actors in such intimidating roles. But Majors has the skill and intensity to make this character his own.
(Majors’ performance as Dame shares a lot in common with his central turn in Magazine Dreams, Elijah Bynum’s film which opened at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival. Both characters are men obsessed with goals of physical achievement; both are willing to break apart their bodies—and any opportunity for connection with others—to reach those goals; and each bounce between awkward and threatening.)
While he gives a strong performance as Dame, I can’t help but want a little more, or a little different. Majors is so adept at expressing subtlety and warmth—aspects woven into his roles in Da 5 Bloods and The Last Black Man in San Francisco—that it’s a bit dissatisfying to see his energy spent in characters driven so completely by anger. Still, he’s always interesting, and his presence is a strength to Creed III.
With most of the fun in the directorial style and arresting performances, there’s not much weight riding on the story. Which is good, because Creed III’s narrative arc is fine, if basic and a little choppy. There will be rivalry, there will be humiliation, there will be training, there will be a moment of willpower, and there will be the final, decisive punch.
In between all of that, however, what makes Creed III interesting is just how much the movie questions whether violence is even effective. As their daughter, Amara, begins to fight at school, Bianca makes it clear that being able to defend herself isn’t sufficient. “She’s got to know why she wants to fight.” And there’s a consistent exhortation—to both Amara and Adonis—to “find another way.” For a film that will inevitably set its climax in a boxing ring, Creed III has a lot of generative ideas on its mind. In the conflict between Creed and Dame, there’s a difficult question of what we owe to one another and how we repair the damage time and misfortune have dealt to relationships. The result is a boxing movie where emotional reckoning gets equal screen time with punches.
That tension between brutality and repair forms an undercurrent to Creed III that carries the fights into something more intriguing than a mere show of force. Even while the camera frames the fighters as modern titans, and even as bodies trade vicious blows, it’s clear that the stakes aren’t about trophies, but about visions of how life is to be lived. Without giving many details, the climactic bout is heavily stylized, and Jordan has talked about the influence that anime had on his approach to the boxing matches.
That strong influence, along with smart camera choreography, revitalizes scenes we’ve seen play out innumerable times before. The blows are held, emphasized. The pain framed and elongated. In the end, the effect of these choices is that all of the unnecessary trappings are stripped away. The battle is about only one thing: Creed and Dame’s relationship. The emotional heft at the core of the central conflict (with echoes of 2011’s Warrior) is what makes the final fight electric.
In the end, a nonviolent path remains somewhere outside the imaginary space of this movie. But it’s intriguing that the film even attempted to imagine that, dared to levy such doubts on a series obsessed with blood and muscle. It leaves the audience with some dilemmas alongside the sense of triumph, and that’s a welcome addition to a blockbuster film. I’m excited to see how Jordan and Majors’ careers continue, and I hope they each manage to break out of the sequel and superhero mills to create more inventive, surprising work. As far as studio sequels go, however, Creed III is a strong showing.
