From Russia With Love
Men's Health UK|January - February 2019

Ivan Drago, the Lethal Soviet Boxer From Rocky Iv, Is Back. And in Creed Ii, He’s Brought Along His Equally Ruthless Son. Mh Met Dolph Lundgren and Florian Munteanu to Talk Musclebuilding in Your Sixties and Leaving Body Fat on the Canvas. There’s More to This on-screen Family Than Iron Strength

Amos Barshad
From Russia With Love

It’s a sunny afternoon, and two men sit on a bench outside a bar in Brooklyn. They’re the image of father and son, and that’s what they are – of a sort, at least. The younger man is Florian Munteanu. He’s 28, a boxer and fitness model born in Germany to a family who had fled Nicolae CeauÈ™escu’s Communist Romania. The older man is Dolph Lundgren. He’s 61, a bulky Swedish nerd and veteran of Hollywood’s 1980s “action wars”.

In the 1985 film Rocky IV, Lundgren played boxer Ivan Drago, the USSR’s seemingly indestructible killing machine. The movie was released in the last throes of the Cold War and, as a riff on realpolitik, it was huge in every way: buffoonish, xenophobic but utterly thrilling. And Drago – built like a tank, nearly mute, always glistening – perfectly embodied American fears of Russian evil. He was death from above (Lundgren is 6ft 5in), precision-crafted in a lab by whiteclad Soviet scientists. Unforgivably, he killed Apollo Creed in the ring and broke Rocky’s heart. But the reason he has remained in our consciousness more than three decades later is that his very image sowed fear. Ivan Drago was pure cinema “baddie”.

In Creed II – the eighth film in the Rocky franchise – Drago is back and, this time, he’s brought along his son, Viktor (Munteanu). In a development both compelling and stupidly inevitable, Viktor will fight Michael B Jordan’s Adonis Creed, Apollo’s son. Our global conflicts, our ideals of strength, our relationships with our dads: what hasn’t changed since the moment Apollo hit the canvas? More than 40 years since the first Rocky film, these ostensibly two-dimensional characters are here to grapple with all of these revolutions.

This story is from the January - February 2019 edition of Men's Health UK.

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This story is from the January - February 2019 edition of Men's Health UK.

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