YMMV / Rocky IV

• Alternative Character Interpretation
  • Who is Ivan Drago, anyway? It's implied that he's been bred to box, has had steroids and blood-doping up the wazoo, and is supposed to support the State 24/7. He's treated like an object by his government and we're never told what he wants. When he says "I must break you", he means it - he must because he has no options. When he says, "If he dies, he dies", is he talking about Apollo or himself? Creed II would eventually confirm this was indeed the case, as his loss to Rocky completely ruined his life for this very reason.
  • An interpretation of Apollo Creed is that he's fed up with retirement and growing old gracefully, and wants to go out fighting like a warrior. Implied by Apollo's line at the end of Rocky III and reinforced in this movie:
    Apollo: You know Stallion... it's too bad we gotta get old, huh?
    Apollo: Without some challenge, without some damn war to fight, then the warrior may as well be dead!
    • In Creed, Apollo's son brings up this point and Rocky shows what he thinks of it.
      Adonis: Maybe he wanted to go out like a fighter.
      Rocky: No, I think he'd rather be here, talking to you.
  • It's possible that the Villain Has a Point moments mentioned on the main page were intentional, and that the film was trying to paint the Americans and Soviets as Mirroring Factions in their fanatical patriotism and aggressiveness. Trouble is, if this were true, it's undermined by the Soviet characters being such cartoonish strawmen.
  • Apollo dies in the ring fighting against Ivan Drago. Years later, Creed reveals that Apollo had an affair outside of marriage, resulting in a son. That puts a new light on his actions and motivations in this film. Was his infidelity and hunger to regain his former glory signs of a mid-life crisis? Or did he knowingly step into the ring with a devastatingly powerful, much larger, and ruthless fighter (who was also much younger to boot), as a way of paying for his indiscretions?
  • The Director's Cut has a view that the conflict is much more personal between Rocky, Apollo, and Drago, with the former two dealing with the fact that their fame, as well as fighting potential, is ultimately fleeting. Drago isn't going to be the person who dethrones them because he's the best, but simply because it's inevitable in sports.
  • When Drago kills Apollo, it's mostly accepted that this is a gratuitously dickish act to cement how heartless Drago is. But alternatively, considering that in the press conference, Apollo made a lot of jokes at his and his country's expense that all Drago did in response was give Apollo a rather mild shove... this can be seen as a Patriotic Fervor gone wrong: Drago loves his country and dedicates himself wholly for them. He didn't take Apollo's insults and jokes that well, so he goes all out in the match to the point of killing Apollo to make him pay for insulting him and especially the Soviets (with the country approving and drilling him to do it). Exhibition matches be damned, someone insults his country, that someone isn't going anywhere alive.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Paulie's robot buddy. Especially Apollo's reaction to it.
• Contested Sequel: Possibly the most polarizing entry in the franchise, with seemingly equal amounts of defenders and detractors. While its fans love the emotional story of Rocky avenging Apollo, the training montages and soundtrack, and Ivan Drago, its critics bring up issues with the tone being a severe contrast to the earlier films, as well as the rather cartoonish patriotism and depiction of the Soviet Union. And there are some who admit that the film is heavily flawed, but can't help but enjoy it due to the sheer '80s cheese and over-the-top awesomeness on display.
• Critic-Proof: It got fairly poor reviews even at the time, yet remains to this day the highest grossing Rocky/Creed film by far.
• Fair for Its Day: As with most Cold War-era films featuring Russians as the villains they are cartoonishly evil, talking of their superiority to anything American with a clinical coldness to it. But Drago shows dissatisfaction with how his superiors treat him as a tool and shares mild Worthy Opponent feelings towards Rocky and the initially hostile crowd warms up to Rocky as Rocky proves his determination as the fight goes on, while Rocky's speech at the end has him mention his respect to the people of Russian and calling for peace between the two nations rather than simply being satisfied with victory.
• Fight Scene Failure:
  • "Just to give you an idea how hard these guys were punching, sometimes the punch didn't even land! But their head flew back anyways, like from the air or something."
  • "These guys landed 91% of their power punches, that's unheard of!"^note The choreography isn't stellar. Rocky and Drago just take turns delivering power punches to their opponent's unprotected face. They barely even put their gloves up, much less make any attempt to dodge or weave. For comparison, in the heavyweight title fight between the top ranked Tyson Fury and Deontay Wilder, the fighters landed 36% and 17% of their power punches, respectively.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • As if Apollo's death wasn't bad enough, thirty years later we learn about the effect it had on his unborn son in the spin-off film Creed.
    • A few decades since his death Rocky is still remorseful in not doing anything to prevent Apollo's death.
  • Then there is Rocky's "You'd never be rid of me" promise to Adrian. Cue Rocky Balboa decades later.
  • Drago tells Rocky "I must break you." While it may such seem like an intimidating threat, in Creed II, it turns out there was indeed a hell of a lot more riding on that match. He really HAD to win that fight, and losing it utterly ruined him.
  • Drago's loud proclamation that he only fights for himself and not his country, while brave, also no doubt played a large part in him being exiled from the Soviet Union. As far as they were concerned, if Drago wouldn't fight for them, he was useless. It makes you think that if Drago had kept his mouth shut, they may have given him a second chance.
    • Drago manhandling a member of the Politboro (regardless of the provocation) in front of a huge crowd of Soviet fans probably didn't go over well, either. Glasnost may be the only reason he was merely exiled, and otherwise emerged in one piece by the time of Creed II.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The depiction of the new (at the time) Soviet premiere Mikhail Gorbachev. While Gorbachev wasn't exactly "nice," his public persona made him look like a peaceful wise leader. And this worked extremely well in America and elsewhere in the West (the infamous "Gorbymania"), making his depiction in this movie hilariously stand out.
  • The main villain of the movie being a nigh-unstoppable Husky Russkie boxer looks oddly prescient today. At the time, Soviet boxers weren't allowed to compete, but tended to dominate at the Olympics. In the late 90s, as the Iron Curtain laid dormant and ex-Warsaw Pact countries started allowing their boxers to compete in international competition, Eastern European boxers quickly took over the scene, especially in the cruiserweight and heavyweight divisions. Ex-WarPac heavyweight champions after 1999 included Vitali Klitschko (Ukrainian), Nikolai Valuev (Russian), Siarhei Liakhovich (Belarusian), Oleg Maskayev (Russian), Ruslan Chagaev (Tatar), Sultan Ibragimov (Russo-Dagestani), Alexander Povetkin (Russian), and Oleksandr Usyk (Ukrainian).^note Andrew Golota (Polish) also would have been a heavyweight champion if not for exceptionally corrupt judgement in a fight he clearly won against John Ruiz. Also him deciding to throw low blows against Riddick Bowe after dominating him for the entire fight. Currently the statistically most successful heavyweight champion of all time (longest reign, most defenses, longest undefeated streak, etc.) is a Ukrainian, Wladimir Klitschko, who has a rather similar physique to Drago (he's a lot more personable, thankfully).
  • In the Japanese dub of the film, or at least in the regular dubbed version of it, both Apollo and Drago were voiced by Kenji Utsumi and Norio Wakamoto respectively. Both actors previously worked before together as Raoh and Shuren respectively in Fist of the North Star. The hilarity came with the fact that in FOTNS, Raoh kills Shuren when the latter tries to kill Raoh in a suicide attack towards him. In Rocky IV, the roles are inverted this time, and "Shuren" (Drago) returns the favor towards "Raoh" (Apollo).
  • Turns out in this movie Rocky had a robot before Tommy Gunn.
  • Sylvester Stallone's rocky marriage with Brigitte Nielsen led to Andrew "Dice" Clay's quip about the film: "In Rocky IV, Dolph Lundgren told Stallone 'I must break you.' Brigitte Nielsen told him 'I will break you.'"
    • Doubly funny in that Brigitte Nielsen is all but completely removed from the Director's Cut that Stallone made.
  • The climactic fight takes place on December 25th. Several years later, on December 25th of 1991, Gorbachev resigned as the USSR president and dissolved the Soviet Union (it came into effect the next day).
• It Was His Sled: Apollo dies. This has become one of the major plot points of the Creed series.
• Memetic Badass: Ivan Drago. A lot of YouTube comments joke that a sniper was prepared to kill him, but either him or the bullet were too scared to go near him.
• Memetic Mutation: Mostly by Ivan Drago.
  • "Whatever he hits... he destroys!"^ExplanationNot said by Drago, but the quote becomes applicable to any cases of very strong men with very strong punches.
  • "I must break you."^ExplanationDrago's signature quote is oft-repeated in case of parodies in regards of strong people or parodying his actor. (sometimes with Fake Russian accent)
  • "If he dies, he dies."^ExplanationDrago's quote to showcase his case of Lack of Empathy on killing Creed is often snowcloned to show an expression of ignorance or Lack of Empathy. The format being "If [Subject A] [Verb A], [Subject A] [Verb A]."
• Moral Event Horizon: Before being Vindicated by History, Drago's No Holds Barred Beat Down of Apollo, resulting in his death, count as this. A blink-and-you'll-miss-it moment is he pushes away the referee who was trying to break it up, implying he consciously meant to kill Apollo. What he said afterwards grinds in what kind of person he is.
  If he dies, he dies.
  • However, later on, especially after Creed II was released, this ended up being counted as either a Kick the Dog at worst (his Lack of Empathy back then was still true), or a result of his brutal, merciless training culture that eventually abandoned him after he failed (where he's told to win and continue fighting at full strength no matter the consequence). In hindsight, many saw most of Ivan's dickish moment as having to fulfill his obligation or else he'll pay the price (which happens in Creed II).
• Narm: The robot, which seems quite out of place in a movie as realistic as this.
• Narm Charm: The overwrought tragedy of Apollo's death, the outdated Cold War patriotism, the cartoonish Russians, and the Rocky's Anvilicious speech are all generally taken by fans as part of the film's appeal.
• Padding: The film is fairly short already at 91 minutes. If you take out the end credits, the obligatory repeating of the final scene of Rocky III as the opening scene to this movie, and a somewhat baffling midpoint montage of moments from the first three movies including this one, the film actually contains closer to about 75 minutes of new footage. And that 75 minutes is further watered down by BLAMs and montages, meaning the story itself is less than an hour.
  • There are two extended training montages that go on for 9 minutes together, nearly twice as much as the montage in the second movie and nearly three times the montage in the first.
  • James Brown's "Living in America" musical number goes on for 5 minutes.
  • The bizarre subplot where Paulie receives an extremely sophisticated robot as a birthday present takes another few minutes.
  • Invoked. Stallone cut an hour's worth of footage out of the movie so it would be 90 minutes long, play more times in theaters, and make more money (and it worked). A lot of the montages are there to replace the numerous scenes that were removed entirely, such as Rocky being stripped of his title by the boxing commission, Rocky trying to train in America but repeatedly being interrupted by veteran or political groups, and a scene where the feds come to Rocky's home, tell him not to fight Drago, wind up threatening him, and Adrian subsequently throws them out of the house. In any case, the final shooting script does have those scenes, implying that they were indeed filmed.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • The film is just seething with Cold War-era patriotism and anti-Communist sentiment of the mid-1980s. The U.S. and Soviet Union would begin to improve relations with each other within a few years.
  • The music, dear god could it be more 80's? Paulie's robot is one of the greatest examples of the cute robot trope commonly used during the era. For living in the Soviet Union, Drago and his wife sure had fashionable haircuts for the time (albeit the short hair variety). Notice Rocky, Paulie, and Duke wearing red white and blue BOSS sweatshirts.
• Vindicated by History: Sort of. It's still considered a very cheesy film by many, but the way Creed was able to use Apollo's death to launch its own story, which is now regarded as the best the series has been since the first film, gives it a more respectable place in the franchise. Creed II revisiting the Drago plotline and giving increased depth to Ivan and the events of this film also helped. In general while fans will acknowledge how much of a far cry this is from the more grounded first film, these days many fans love the film for its Narm Charm and how unapologetic this film is in its cheesiness.

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