Last week saw the release of Creed, a movie starring Michael B. Jordan (not the former Chicago Bull and current all-purpose laughing gif) and what’s left of the industrial latex and prayers holding Sylvester Stallone together in yet another unprecedented and innovative attempt at spinning off and rebooting a franchise that was good in the 80s. This time they’ve got their money hungry studio executive talons into boxing odyssey Rocky, a franchise that stopped being anything resembling sane right around Rocky III and almost required subtitles for any Stallone dialogue by the most recent film in 2006.
That said, even despite the near constant presence of the shambling corpse of Sylvester Stallone’s acting career in a fedora, Creed has performed remarkably well at both the box office and with the critics amongst both casual audience members and the professionals. Not missing a beat, frontman of the turn of the millenium hard rock band voted The Worst of the 90s by Rolling Stone, Creed and noted cinematic connoisseur Scott Stapp was drafted by Funny Or Die to give his expert opinion in a review of the film.
As far as jokes go this one’s about as groundbreaking as Scott Stapp’s day job of being a destitute man’s Eddie Vedder, in a surprising twist Scott doesn’t realise that the movie named Creed isn’t a biopic of his band Creed, but the sentiment is great and some of the jokes do land. The reference to real life Stapp ‘punching the guy from 311‘ (another equally shitty rock band) was pure gold and his bemoaning the lack of mountain guitar solos and clifftop singing had me chuckling too.
I was not aware he could communicate in anything but off-key vowels. It’s the most coherent and healthy-looking I’ve seen Scott Stapp in some time as well. Considering his recent troubles with both mental health and bankruptcy and also how one of the last times anyone put a camera in his face this uh… this happened:
-it’s good to see the dude on his two feet and totally not crazy, even just for a two minute comedy video.
It’s not the first time the film and band have found their paths intertwined, a change.org petition started by Creed fans demanding the title of the movie be changed to something a little bit more respectful of the ‘Creedmunity’ (that nobody ever quite worked out whether it was serious or not) did the rounds earlier in the year before the film was released.
I guess it really isn’t that tough being a film cricket. All in all, Can You Take Me To The Movies with Scott Stapp was better than anything anyone from Creed has done, ever, and would be possibly the only replacement for At The Movies With Margaret And David I’d give a second thought to.