When a film follows a path far different from its trailers, it can be a bait and switch shill, or a blessing. I can’t express how relieved I was to see that “Rocky 7,” or as it is officially titled, “Creed,” is not the film that the marketing department promised us. Unlike the brutal boxing melodrama that the previews pledged, this excellent sequel introduces new characters to the series while paying homage to the enduring appeal of its predecessors. 
 
 “Creed” follows the themes and gambits of classic fight films but this is no paint-by-numbers imitation. It unabashedly manipulates audiences without guile, jerks tears, piles on hardships and smooths out conflicts on its way to a wholesome, uplifting finale. It is cornball as all get out, formulaic and wonderfully, amazingly delicious. 
 
 The plot is basic. A journeyman boxer who grew up in cruddy state facilities wants to climb up the ranks to the top of the professional totem pole. On his way to the championship, he must learn how to protect his fragile soul. If you saw Jake Gyllenhaal being beaten to ground chuck in Antoine Fuqua’s grim “Southpaw” last summer, this may feel familiar. The prologue showing the hard-knocks life of brawling preteen Adonis Johnson Creed suggests he might have the menace of a Clubber Lang. Luckily, things quickly get better. The out-of-wedlock, essentially abandoned child of the late champ Apollo Creed, Adonis grows up shadow boxing to share his iconic father’s limelight. 
 
 Michael B. Jordan (as compelling here as he was in director Ryan Coogler’s previous film “Fruitvale Station”) infuses considerable depth to the essentially likable character. Adonis has a combative hair trigger, but he’s conflicted about fighting, at times reluctant to commit to the sport that killed his dad. 
 
 Who could be a better mentor than Rocky Balboa, the patron saint of Philadelphia? At 69, Sylvester Stallone returns to his archetypal role in a touching, deeply felt performance. He’s no longer the main character but definitely a main character. Well into retirement years, the Italian Stallion has the adorable, hangdog demeanor of an aged pet bulldog. Pro boxing is no country for old he-men, but Rocky is the ideal sidekick for Adonis in this mismatched buddy picture. Adonis convinces Rocky to guide him toward a championship bout and introduces him to everyone as his uncle. 
 
 Never a great actor, Stallone is a good and hugely appealing one, getting by more on an affable regular guy persona than talent. As he has in earlier films, Stallone treats Rocky as a sweet, lumbering sad sack. His shy smiles, sad eyes, shambling walk and soft diction imply the physical impact of aging. It’s a sly performance, pushing away the tough guy iconography of Rocky and revealing the man. 
 
 Creed ★★★½ out of 4 stars Rating: PG-13 for violence, language and some sensuality. 
 
 Stallone and Jordan make a great team in the inevitable training montages, a regimen of long runs and workouts in battered boxing gyms that capture the natural rhythm of fighting. That’s the world where Rocky touches the soul of his young protégé. Tessa Thompson (“Dear White People”) reaches just as deep as the nightclub singer who becomes Adonis’ girlfriend, her dumpling cheeks and big, sharp-focused eyes appraising him with a demand for 100 percent honesty at all times. 
 
 The story builds through a trio of key fight scenes, one three-minute barrage composed with no visible cuts as if the camera is realistically capturing a real brawl. Even in the bloodiest, there are no real villains here. As Rocky tells Adonis time and again, his toughest adversary is himself. The film is morally sound beginning to end. 
 
 Adonis’ title fight triggers giddy heights of cathartic glee, but that’s not the story’s big ending. The stirring finale comes as Stallone and Jordan slowly mount the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the sort of nostalgic image that leaves you undecided whether to cheer or get out your handkerchief. ||||| In Creed II, the reasonably entertaining sequel to 2015’s knockout Creed, Michael B. Jordan plays a heavyweight champ who drives himself around in his own car, remains refreshingly unmobbed in the streets of Philadelphia as he makes his way to his favorite Philly-steak joint, and, in a moment of genuine despair, brings his infant daughter to the gym, where he regains his previously lost will to fight. These are the kinds of gonzo dramatic touches you want in a boxing movie, especially in the follow-up to a movie as gorgeously exuberant as Creed was. 
 
 They’re not nearly enough. But at least they’re something. Creed II, directed by Steven Caple Jr. (who has made one previous movie feature, a 2016 skateboarding drama called The Land), is bluntly diverting: You can spend a few hours watching it and feel little pain, other than the occasional sympathetic spasm during the movie’s climactic, and at least semi-thrilling, fight sequence. This time around, Jordan’s Adonis Johnson—who, as you’ll likely remember, is the illegitimate son of Rocky Balboa’s late foe-turned-friend Adonis Creed—is riding high as the heavyweight champ, and he decides to ask Tessa Thompson’s Bianca to become his wife. (She says yes.) Then he accepts the challenge of a new, formidable foe, Viktor Drago (played by heavyweight boxer Florian “Big Nasty” Munteanu), son of Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren). The elder Drago killed Adonis’ father in the ring (as seen in the 1985 Rocky IV). Now, he’s pushing his sullen, beefy kid to follow in his thuggish footsteps. Young Adonis’ trainer and surrogate dad Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) doesn’t like the idea of a Creed-Drago ticket one bit, but Adonis feels compelled to accept. He fires Rocky and retreats to Los Angeles with Bianca to get ready for the big match. 
 
 That’s hardly the nub of it. There are too many trifling ideas, and too much plot, stuffed into Creed II to make it the sleek powerhouse that its predecessor was. There’s some nostalgia value in seeing Lundgren again: Dad Drago is a stern, formidable robot—until he isn’t. He spends most of the movie barking orders at his son, as he supervises the kid’s training at home in the Ukraine. Silent and sullen, Viktor glowers resentfully as his dad—who is also, apparently, his boss at work—yells things at him like, “When you’re done, unload the cement” and “When I say faster, run faster.” Viktor dutifully unloads the cement. Ever compliant, he runs faster. Muneteanu’s Viktor does all that is asked of him, by both Drago and Caple, and wordlessly, he paints a believable picture of a mighty strong dude who not-so-secretly resents living under his father’s thumb. 
 
 Drago the elder also plays cruel mind games on his son, telling him that his mom left the two of them because Viktor just wasn’t good enough. (When Brigitte Nielsen shows up to reprise the role of Ludmilla Drago, she’s an icicle in a dress, and you’ll be super-glad she’s not your mom.) Meanwhile, Adonis has all the love and support in the world—from Bianca, who’s pursuing her music career even as she’s losing her hearing, from the woman who took him in and raised him as her own, Phylicia Rashad’s Mary Anne, and, of course, from Rocky. Watching Stallone in this role is like slipping into a pair of old running shoes, so beat-up and run-down you don’t even bother to untie the laces. He’s as charming and funny as he needs to be, and he gets you through. 
 
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 Similarly, Jordan is also effortlessly likable, though unlike Stallone he is often shirtless. His sculpted masculine beauty is not lost on either Caple or cinematographer Kramer Morgenthau: They film the shiny surface of his chest with proper reverence for the glory of the human form, although their camera is not above a silent visual whisper of “Day-um” now and then. We are, all of us, only human. 
 
 The film, overall, is handsome-looking—a good thing, because no one needs an ugly boxing movie. And the final fight sequence has a brutal, stylish sheen: When Viktor, the forlorn child turned dirty fighter, pops his meaty fist into Adonis’ rib cage, you feel the crunch of these fragile but all-important bones. Creed II is a perfectly OK sequel. There’s some comfort to be found in the predictability of its beats. But only at the end does it muster any real vitality. Any ribs it breaks along the way have healed seamlessly before you’ve even left the theater. 
 
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– The son of former heavyweight champion Apollo Creed turns up in Philadelphia to be trained by his dead father's once-opponent Rocky Balboa in Creed—a movie cheered by critics, who give it a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Here's what they're saying: "You'd expect a boxing movie to deliver the body blows, but what's surprising are the various tender caresses the movie delivers," writes Joe Dziemianowicz at the New York Daily News. Creed not only "packs a mighty punch," but it's "an exciting, amusing, and well-acted crowd-pleaser," he says. Sylvester Stallone will "knock your socks off," he adds. Sure, the David-versus-Goliath angle is "corny, but it still works." "Despite getting laid out in excruciatingly graphic detail, the kid somehow comes roaring back, not so much struggling to his feet as leaping. Which is exactly what this energetic, hugely entertaining film does for the four-decades-old franchise," writes Tom Russo at the Boston Globe. Michael B. Jordan and Stallone are each great on their own and "develop a terrific, relaxed chemistry," he says. The movie also "works on two levels, tending equally to nostalgists and a younger crowd." "This is the best Rocky film since the original" and "one of the year's warmest and most crowd-pleasing surprises," praises Lou Lumenick at the New York Post. A training montage shows writer-director Ryan Coogler "not only respects but totally gets what made the original underdog classic win the Best Picture Oscar in 1977." It's this that helps him deliver "a knockout punch." Stallone, meanwhile, delivers "one of his most careful and nuanced performances in years." "Creed follows the themes and gambits of classic fight films but this is no paint-by-numbers imitation," writes Colin Covert at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "This excellent sequel introduces new characters to the series while paying homage to the enduring appeal of its predecessors," he says. "It unabashedly manipulates audiences ... on its way to a wholesome, uplifting finale. It is cornball as all get out, formulaic, and wonderfully, amazingly delicious."