By now, you’ve probably heard the story about how Sylvester Stallone once acted in a soft-core porno flick before making it big as an A-List star. It’s a fun bit of early career trivia to share about one of Hollywood’s biggest names; a fascinating bit of lore about a man with enormous mythology surrounding him.
The issue, however, with creating cinematic lore about well-known real-life figures is that moments like this will be aggressively shoe-horned in as scenes in movies that fundamentally don’t need them. In I Play Rocky, the latest film from Academy Award winning director Peter Farrelly, that soft-core episode of Sly Stallone’s life is awkwardly stuffed into this biopic about the making of Rocky.
The scene occurs early in the film, and beyond the brief excitement of recognizing what’s being dramatized, the scene serves little purpose for the remainder of the film. It’s a prime example of what doesn’t work about I Play Rocky.
At its core, I Play Rocky is for all intents and purposes a character study movie. We are meant to empathize with, grow with, and come to understand our main character, Sylvester Stallone (Anthony Ippolito). Unfortunately, the film is rarely interested in actually exploring its main character. Which is a shame, because Ippolito is incredibly impressive in the main role.
Rather than focusing on simply doing a Stallone impression, Ippolito does attempt to fully embody the character. And it should be noted that while he is indeed good at the impression elements of the performance, it’s obvious he’s searching for more –a chance to dig just a little bit deeper.
However, there’s not a lot for him to dig into within the performance. Peter Gamble’s script fails to explore anything beneath the surface of its protagonist. And Farrelly’s direction, while competent, does little in the way of providing additional life to the already suffocating script. Resulting in Ippolito not having the space nor the opportunity to properly showcase all that he could have done with the character.
Other characters, including Stallone’s wife, Sasha (AnnaSophia Robb), and Rocky producers, Irvin Winkler and Robert Chartoff (PJ Byrne and Toby Kebbell), are similarly constricted by the film’s construction, but not to the same extent as the lead. Many of the film’s best scenes involve the negotiation struggle between Winkler/Chartoff and studio exec Sandy Maddox (Tracy Letts).
There’s great humor in their bickering back and forths and Maddox’s deep disdain for Paramount. It’s hard not to imagine how much I Play Rocky could have truly thrived if the focus was shifted to the perspective of those three. The scenes also serve as a reminder that Farrelly is at his best when doing pure comedy, rather than chasing awards clout.
Robb, similar to Ippolito struggles with a lack of clear pathway to fully realizing her role as Sasha. The character is often reduced to a one-dimensional supportive partner role, with no interests or worries of her own. Everything she does is in service of Sylvester’s progressions. And there’s little room for real chemistry between the two stars, despite a clear desire for their love to be grounding for Stallone in his journey through the making of Rocky.
I Play Rocky never reaches into what he needs grounding from, or grounding for. The beats of the story are hit cleanly and (mostly) concisely throughout, but with a lack of intrigue. We don’t delve into the insecurities that Stallone has about his ability as an actor. There’s little to suggest where his stubborn nature is derived from. It becomes evident that he’s a better writer than actor, and he doesn’t appear to totally hate it. Yet, it remains unclear why he’s so averse to pursuing that vocation. Or why he can’t just sell the Rocky script and pursue other acting opportunities.
We don’t need these questions answered in the real world because we have the hindsight of how they were actually resolved. Rocky went on to be a massive success, and is widely regarded as one of the greatest movies of all time. Sylvester Stallone is a household name synonymous with action movie stardom.
But within the context of a film, especially a film like this, it proves to be irresponsible for the story attempted to be told to leave these stones unturned, and these questions unanswered. At the very least, they need to be contemplated. These character insights and thematic curiosities would have all been immensely beneficial to our understand of Sly Stallone and his story. It would have made I Play Rocky’s supposedly triumphant ending resonate so much more.
Instead, it suffers a TKO of its own making. There’s little in the way of excitement from a cinematic perspective. The scenes of the making of Rocky include tidbits about its use of the steadicam, the iconic score, and lightning-fast shooting pace. All inspired filmmaking choices, that lead to iconic movie moments.
The most we get here in the way of artistic inspiration is an opening shot of a slow circling pan reveal of Ippolito as Stallone, auditioning for a role under the stage name “Mike”. The rest of the movie that follows is a dull recreation of real-life stories we’ve heard or read elsewhere.
Like that one about the time Sylvester Stallone did soft-core porn before he became famous.
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