Like Sylvester Stallone, director Peter Farrelly – he of Dumb and Dumber, There’s Something About Mary and virtually every gross-out hit of the early 2000s – knows how to please an audience.
Maybe that mutual knack for popcorn escapism is what drew Farrelly to I Play Rocky, which tells the real-life story of Stallone’s underdog struggle to make the original 1976 Rocky. Working from a script by Peter Gamble, Farrelly revives a famous bit of Hollywood lore: the fact that Stallone, who has become virtually synonymous with Rocky Balboa, had to fight like, well, Rocky himself to get cast in the role.
We see Stallone, played by a newcomer named Anthony Ippolito (he also played Al Pacino in The Offer miniseries), in his down-and-out-in-New-York early days. sleeping in alleys and working lowly jobs, even resorting to working in a soft-core porn film.
He makes the extremely smart move of marrying Sasha Czack (AnnaSophia Robb), who he meets working at a movie theater. She advises him to write his own scripts and give himself the best parts. Several scripts later, having moved to L.A., working as an actor but still broke, he knocks out Rocky in just over three days.
Producers quickly take interest, but they want Robert Redford or Ryan O’Neal for the title role. Stallone turns down a fortune – by his standards – by repeating the title assertion. They keep making him higher offers, but he won’t budge.
Robb and Ippolito are both charming and easy to invest in. Toby Kebbell and P. J. Byrne make a good kvetchy comedy team as producers Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler, and Tracy Letts is hilarious as a splenetic exec who regards Stallone’s entrenched refusals as a personal affront. Jay Duplass has an amused, dreamy vibe as Rocky director John Avildsen. Stephan James gets across the ebullient energy of Carl Weathers, and Kiki Seto makes an adorable Talia Shire.
I have no doubt that Farrelly and Gamble compress and intensify Stallone’s dire straits and downplay some of his early successes – it’s not mentioned, for instance, that he had been a gym teacher at a girl’s school in Switzerland before he was 20 years old. There’s an element of “when I was your age I had to walk barefoot to school” in the early scenes. And some of the stories of the seat-of-the-pants production of Rocky in the second act have probably grown a bit in the telling too (Stallone supposedly had no involvement in I Play Rocky, by the way).
It doesn’t matter. I Play Rocky is irresistible. Even though I knew, like almost everyone who sees it will know, how it turns out, I was on the edge of my seat. Perhaps that’s because the character we’re getting here isn’t really Stallone: It’s Rocky Balboa. Farrelly replaces the calculating Hollywood climber, who in a few years will leave Sasha and marry Rocky IV co-star Brigitte Nielsen, with the pure-hearted pugilist-saint he created, but who has long since tipped over, out of cinema and into the realm of American folklore. Maybe that’s the best of him.
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It’s hard to grasp why any more versions of A Christmas Carol would be needed, but new versions keep getting made. The latest, Ebenezer, is a vehicle for Johnny Depp as Scrooge, under makeup that vaguely recalls a cross between Mrs. Doubtfire and Glenn Close in Hillbilly Elegy. One of the lines being used to promote the film – “Think you know his story? Think again” – pushes the idea that this is a bold new take on the tale.
It isn’t, really. Directed by horror guy Ti West of X and MaXXXine, the movie does emphasize the story’s macabre or horrific elements, and it features good rickety, whimsical music by Tyler Bates.
The script, by Nathaniel Halpern, plays with the intriguing idea that the Spirits of Christmas Past (a freaky Andrea Riseborough) and Present (Tramell Tillman; dour instead of customarily jolly) are themselves penitential cursed souls, like Marley. And the sentimental aspects of the material, like the scenes of Bob Cratchit (Rupert Grint) and his family, are kept to a minimum.
Even so, this is essentially a straightforward telling, nowhere near as harsh a re-thinking as the 2019 British TV miniseries A Christmas Carol, with Guy Pearce as Scrooge. But Ebenezer works, as most versions of this story seem to work. Depp entertainingly lets it rip in the lead, and the supporting cast is full of pungent pros. Towering above them all is Ian McKellen as Marley, wonderfully weary in his posthumous rescue mission.
