I Play Rocky review: an uncanny Stallone carries a crowd-pleaser

Fifty years after Rocky, somebody finally made a movie about the guy who refused to let anyone else play him. And for most of its running time, I Play Rocky is as hard to resist as the underdog it celebrates.

Our verdict: a warm, funny, very well-cast crowd-pleaser with a star-making lead. It plays it safe, and it borrows a lot of its punch from the film it's about. We give it 7 out of 10.

Peter Farrelly, the director of Green Book, directs from a script by Peter Gamble. It's 1974. Sylvester Stallone is a struggling actor in his late 20s living in a Times Square flophouse. He watches Muhammad Ali fight the journeyman Chuck Wepner on TV, writes a boxing script, sells it, and then refuses to let the studio cast anyone but himself.

Anthony Ippolito, best known as the young Al Pacino in The Offer, plays Stallone. AnnaSophia Robb plays his wife, Sasha, with Matt Dillon as his father, Frank Stallone Sr., P.J. Byrne and Toby Kebbell as producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff, Tracy Letts as a studio boss, Jay Duplass as director John G. Avildsen and Stephan James as Carl Weathers.

Critics mostly like it, with real reservations. It has 88% on Rotten Tomatoes from 98 reviews, but a more measured 66 on Metacritic. Amazon MGM opened it in seven theaters on Nov. 6, where it took $337,465, about $48,000 a screen, before it goes wide on Nov. 20.

A Stallone you'd swear was real

Everything rests on Ippolito, and he delivers. He has the look, the hooded eyes and the low, slurred voice, but he also gets the stubbornness that made Stallone impossible to say no to. Owen Gleiberman, writing for Variety, said "Ippolito's impersonation of Stallone's voice is a miraculous act of channelling." Plenty of critics have already called it a star-making turn.

The best stretch is the making of the original. Rocky was shot for roughly $1 million in 28 days, and the film has real fun with the hustle: Philadelphia locations chosen to dodge the unions, fight scenes Stallone and Weathers had to work out for themselves, a crew making it up as it went. Fans of Rocky will spot the gray sweats, the bandaged hands and the dog.

That dog is Butkus, Stallone's real bull mastiff, and Christopher Schobert of The Film Stage said he "steals every scene in which he appears."

The supporting cast is strong. Robb gives Sasha a spiky edge, and Letts is a joy as a blunt studio money man. Stephan James is the scene-stealer among the humans: JoBlo's Chris Bumbray said "Stephan James is shockingly good as Carl Weathers."

The problem with a perfect impression

The catch is that I Play Rocky leans hard on the movie it's about. The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney said it "repurposes most of its emotional uplift from the movie within the movie", and that's fair: the biggest swells of feeling arrive when the film recreates Rocky, not when it finds something new to say.

It also says surprisingly little about what Rocky did to American movies, or to Stallone himself. Michael Grant of Awful Announcing, who liked it, said it "stops short of greatness", and wished for more of Stephan James. Chase Hutchinson of TheWrap was harsher: "The film consistently makes you wish you were just watching Rocky instead."

The look divides people too. AwardsWatch's Trace Sauveur found the film's recreation of '70s Philadelphia "blandly artificial", and The Times called it a "leaden trawl" through the Rocky backstory. IndieWire's verdict was that it all felt "so, well, Hollywood."

None of that sinks it. Farrelly makes broad, warm, uncomplicated movies, and this is one of his best.

If you grew up on Rocky, or loved Air, this is your kind of night out. Screen Rant's George Bate went as far as calling it possibly "the best narrative feature about the making of a specific film ever." That's generous, but Punch Drunk Critics reported an audience on its feet more than once, and it's easy to see why.

It's PG-13 and runs 2 hours 8 minutes. If it's at a cinema near you now, go; otherwise it lands in many more theaters on Nov. 20, which is the ideal time to see it: with a crowd that wants to cheer.

Stallone wrote himself the part of a lifetime because nobody else would give him one. Ippolito just got his.