Rocky Balboa
April 2007 Reviewed by: Doug Blackburn Format: Blu-ray	(all ratings out of 5): Overall Enjoyment Picture Quality Packaged Extras Sound Quality

I was expecting a creaky Balboa but I got a Balboa with huge arms, cut abs, and popping veins! Even though there was a lot of favorable buzz about Rocky Balboa, I expected to be under-whelmed; I was pleasantly surprised instead. Don’t overanalyze. Don’t worry about clichés. Don’t get all hoity-toity. You know the formula. It has very few adds or deletes from Rocky. Keep your guard up and you can pick holes in it all day, but relax and go with it. It may not be art, but it’s definitely fun.

Rating the Picture Quality was tough. On one hand, the transfer seems very true to the original film. But the original film itself has a number of scenes where lighting is way over the top. Stallone explains in the commentary that they were concerned with the lighting but decided to go with what they had at the time rather than use fixes or wait for a different time of day or for cloud cover to soften the lighting. Some will disapprove of the large variations in lighting but they didn’t bother me at all; in fact, I found the lighting sort of refreshing. Sharpness ranges from good to incredibly good, and it’s always obviously better than DVD sharpness. There are a half-dozen shots where the sharpness is as good as anything seen on Blu-ray so far, but most of the movie is about average or average+ for Blu-ray releases.

The uncompressed LPCM 5.1 soundtrack can’t really be faulted, though it gives a full-range home-theater system limited opportunity to show off. The crowd noise at the big fight is especially clear and detailed. The sound engineers backed off their over-the-top punch sounds from past installments in the Rocky series. This time they went for real-life punch sounds. Punches may not be as dramatic as in the earlier movies, but you sure feel like you’re watching a live fight. Dialogue and ambient sounds are always right on the money. Music interludes are quite nice with great transparency, broad frequency range, and natural tone. So it’s really the nature of the movie that keeps the sound from a higher rating, not any fault of the disc itself.

There’s a wide selection of extras, most in HD. The alternate ending is obvious so it doesn’t really offer any surprises. The deleted scenes were deleted for good reason. The bloopers aren’t particularly funny. The "Making of Rocky Balboa" feature is average, about what you’d expect. The additional "Making of" feature highlights the CG fight in the movie that ignites Rocky’s last stand, and it isn’t very compelling. It’s a sizeable collection of extras, though the whole package comes off as just average. The movie is the thing here.

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