Rating:
Genre:
Soundtrack
Release Date: 12/26/2006
The
soundtrack for
Rocky Balboa, the sixth and final installment in
Sylvester Stallone's seemingly endless boxing epic, eschews the usual mixture of new score and hip mainstream acts for a museum of old cues and acts that were once mainstream. By turning
Rocky Balboa into a "greatest-hits" collection,
Stallone has preserved the American icon in amber without injecting any botox into him, despite the unnecessary inclusion of "panic buttons" like
"It's a Fight" by
Three 6 Mafia and a remix by
John X and
Natalie Wilde of composer
Bill Conti's timeless
"Gonna Fly Now" theme. That means that for better or for worse, the listener gets an
Italian Stallion jukebox stocked with '80s nuggets from
Survivor,
Robert Tepper,
John Cafferty, and
James Brown, as well as all of the key themes from the baton of
Conti. Luckily, there are no tracks from
Stallone's lesser brother,
Frank, who peppered the
soundtrack to
Rocky III with some truly dreadful
disco/
lounge abominations, but that didn't stop the producers from inserting
Conti's equally detestable
"Can't Stop the Fire" from
Rocky V, which should have been replaced with
Vince DiCola's
"Training Montage" from
Rocky IV. Fans who grew up with the films and are looking for a blast of nostalgia will have their nose broken (in a good, metaphorical kind of way) by this audio companion, while listeners who somehow managed to avoid getting on the
Rocky train will wonder what all of the fuss was about.
~James Christopher Monger, All Music Guide
;)
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