Creed III               4 stars

Creed III finds Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan, returning as the star but also directing) retired from his world championship and now the owner of his own boxing gym ad quite well off with his music producer wife Bianca (Tess Thompson) and young daughter. It is the third in the series and the first that his mentor, Rocky Balboa does not appear in. The story starts with the young teenage Adonis at a group home with his buddy Damian who is making it in the boxing world when things take a bad direction and the two of them get caught up in an act of violence. Skip ahead about eighteen years and Creed is preparing world champion Felix for his next title match when a figure from the past, Damian (Jonathan Majors) appears at his door. Having just gotten out of prison, it soon becomes clear that Damian is interested in more than getting reacquainted with his boyhood friend. He has dreams of reaching his goal of becoming a champion and will stop at nothing to get it including exploiting Creed’s feelings of obligation toward him a well as cheating in the ring. Creed is warned that trouble awaits if he follows this path, but that matters little to him. Tragic events follow in a movie that is also about race in addition to being a boxing film. It is about two connected lives that took very different paths because of a single event involving young black men and the justice system. Inevitably, the film goes to the final confrontation between the two fighters in a showdown of a fight that is filmed like it is disconnected from the real world around them. The fight scenes are not as good as in the first Creed movie, but how could they be? That was a legendary film. The events surrounding these two characters may seem implausible in the real world making it quite a stretch, but it is entertaining to see these two talents and very well-conditioned actors performing together.