"Daylight" is one of the most intense movies I have seen in a long time. Still, director John G.Fasten your seatbelts and brace yourself for an non-stop thrill ride that will have you holding your breath from start to finish. The fact that it won the Oscar for Best Picture and became a blockbuster stands testament to the fact that filmgoers responded to it even if the material stands a slight step below quality-wise. Arriving in a decade populated with hard-edged terminally pessimistic dramas such as The French Connection, Serpico, Network, All the President's Men, Taxi Driver, and Apocalypse Now!, Rocky's optimism in presenting the simple unshakable drive of an everyman's champion makes it an underdog of a different sort. Sylvester Stallone's script and performance, ahem, punch up pure character out of a caricature and provide a heart-warming tale that impossibly sports a blue collar Can-Do human spirit that seems unbeatable, even in a very cynical age. In this PG-rated sports drama, a small-time Philadelphia boxer (Stallone) gets a supremely rare chance to fight the heavy-weight champion, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers), in a bout in which he strives to go the distance for his self-respect. Indeed, if it had premiered 30 years earlier, this film very well might have been titled It's a Wonderful Life, You Bum. Remarkable not for its originality but for making a Capra-esque human drama that inspires rather patronizes, Rocky isn't the first underdog sports story but it does define the genre from here on-in. Predictable in the fact that filmgoers will always root for the underdog if they love that underdog, Rocky stands heads and shoulders above all of the boxing tales that try replicating its singular charm.including, ironically, its own sequels.
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