Rocky Balboa
Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

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Retired boxing champ Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) is a widower, running a restaurant, repeating stories of his glory days to the patrons, growing apart from his son. After a computer simulation on ESPN predicts Rocky would knock out current champ Mason Dixon (Antonio Tarver), Dixon challenges Philly's Italian Stallion to a real-life exhibition bout. Rocky accepts, even though one observer calls it "a speed bag versus a punching bag." While Rocky should be awaiting his AARP card, not a heavyweight belt, he teams up with his Uncle Paulie (Burt Young) for a regimen of weightlifting -- about the only thing his calcified joints and dulled reflexes will let him do at his age.

When Rock's trainer tells him, "Every time you hit him with a shot, he's gotta feel like he tried kissing the express train. Let's start buildin' some hurtin' bombs," and the director cues the Rocky theme, you can almost here Mason Dixon's face hitting the canvas. While Rocky Balboa easily could have been TKO'd by melodrama, writer-director Stallone dodges that outcome. Instead, the movie explores the fighter's relationship with his son (Heroes' Milo Ventimiglia) who can never quite escape his dad's shadow, as well as Rocky's own struggle to deal with a life devoid of the media spotlight and fan adulation. After one last taste of ass-kickin', that is.

The bonus features include deleted scenes, bloopers, an alternate ending, a making-of documentary about Stallone's motivation behind making Rocky Balboa, and a look inside the making of the virtual fight, that includes many of the by-now-standard techniques used on NFL players to create the realistic gameplay in Madden games. The coolest extra is a look at how Stallone filmed the final fight scene at the Mandalay Bay in Vegas. Stallone discusses mistakes he made in fight scenes of past Rocky films, how he created realistic punching sound effects and how he positioned the camera and worked with actual live events at Mandalay Bay to create shots for weigh-ins and press conferences. Co-star Antonio Tarver (a real light heavyweight boxer) talks about the intense training Stallone went through to get in shape for the part, and then takes a few shots at Stallone's head to demonstrate that the punches in the movie actually landed.

by Tim Lovejoy