After the frustrating push-pull of “Creed II” (2018), in which Michael B. Jordan’s Adonis Creed engaged in a stealth battle with Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa over dominance of a popular movie franchise, “Creed III” marks a step up.
This is the ninth installment in that franchise. Stallone’s out this time. Jonathan Majors is in, and it’s a fine trade, dramatically speaking.
Right now in theaters Majors can be found struggling with some pretty sludgy material inside green-screen purgatory in “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.” In “Creed III,” by contrast, the actor has somewhere to go with his character’s anguished grudge match, in and out of the ring. The movie is far from perfect; the flashbacks to the main characters’ shared childhood trauma drip-drip-drip the details in ways that can get a little frustrating. But Jordan and Majors are the glue, and we stick with them.
