James Proclaims!

I’m not sure which actor has featured the most often in the various iterations of my annual festive countdown, but Sylvester Stallone has to be in contention. This is in part due to my insistence on including movies with only a tenuous link to Christmas, and Stallone’s insistence in being in such movies.

His Expendables franchise has managed three entries over the years, but it’s the Rocky franchise, which has been a staple of my advent calendar since the very beginning. The original Rocky movie, as well as Rocky III, Rocky IV and Rocky V have all been entries in previous lists and today it is the turn of Rocky II.

The first Rocky sequel is a worthy successor to the Oscar-winning original and retains much of the grounded spirit of the original rather than the bombastic madness of the later sequels. Admittedly because it revisits a lot of familiar ground, it never quite manages to reach the heights of the first movie, but it is definitely one of the better entries in the franchise and has a few iconic moments of its own.

Score for Christmasishness

There is no doubting the Christmas credentials of the first Rocky movie. Rocky IV is arguably even more Christmas(ish). Rocky V, as bad a movie as it is, has some Christmas scenes. It was a stretch when I decided to include Rocky III a couple of years back but Rocky II is probably the least Christmas(ish) of them all. The timeline of the movie runs from January until Thanksgiving, so pretty much covers the 11 months of the year when it definitely is not Christmas. I feel it almost deserves inclusion on the basis that it almost seems to be trying to have nothing to do with Christmas. It mainly makes the list, because, like many Rocky movies, it opens with the final scenes of the preceding movie. And the previous movie does end on New Year’s Day, which falls within the Christmas period. So by the slenderest of margins, Rocky II can finally take its place alongside the other Rocky movies in this most dubious hall of fame.