Warning: This article contains spoilers for Creed 3.Michael B. Jordan’s Adonis Creed previously faced Viktor Drago, the son of the man who killed his father, and although Viktor was a brutal enough villain, Creed 3‘s antagonist is even better. Donnie is making peace with Apollo’s legacy, as well as reflecting on his own, when Damian Anderson, played by Jonathan Majors, comes into his life like a ghost from his past. A childhood friend turned convict, Dame has been released after eighteen years in prison for being caught holding the bag when Donnie attacked someone at their group home. Now, Dame thinks Donnie is living the life that was intended for him.
Donnie tries to give Dame support for his boxing aspirations, but the man who was once like a brother has his sights set on the World Heavyweight Championship, and will do anything to get it, including immobilizing the returning Viktor Drago in Creed 3. Donnie realizes he will have to be the one to end Dame’s title run, even if it means coming out of retirement and facing off against the man who went to prison for him. Viktor ends up helping Donnie train for the match – a gesture that marks his transition from villain to ally, leaving room for Dame to step into the antagonist role with aplomb.
5 Dame Has More Character Development Than Viktor Drago
For a movie that focuses heavily on Adonis, his family, and his new life in Los Angeles, a fair portion of Creed 3 is spent covering Dame and his reintegration into society. Creed 3 shows Dame’s progression from being a shuffling, awkward, insecure person following nearly two decades in confinement to a confident, ruthless contender that knows his own strengths and abilities. In many ways, Dame upstages Donnie’s story, and despite being a new character in Creed 3, has quite a bit more character development than Viktor ever did, even with Drago Jr.’s return to the franchise.
Creed 2 was cluttered with legacy characters, and with old grudges renewed between Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa and Dolph Lungren’s Ivan Drago, Viktor’s story got lost in the shuffle. Any major development occurred towards the end when, after a particularly brutal fight between him and Adonis, Ivan called the match, more concerned with the safety of his son than his ego. That character development does not continue for Viktor in Creed 3, because he does not get to prove how much he changed in the seven years since the fight. Dame is allowed to reveal multiple layers to his character all in the same movie.
4 Dame Has A Personal Connection To Adonis In Creed 3
The personal connection that Dame has with Adonis pushes their confrontations over the edge, and Creed 3 fully breaks a Rocky villain trend by making Dame a sympathetic antagonist. In the Rocky franchise, even villains like Tommy Gunn, whose narrative in Rocky V is similar to Dame’s, have tended to be one-dimensional, with their driving motivation simply to beat the Italian Stallion because he is the champ. In Creed 3, Dame and Adonis fight each other because they know no other way to process their complicated emotional past.
Both men know that going into the ring is a losing battle; whoever wins will have fractured, perhaps irreparably, a sacred brotherhood made all the more hallowed because of its cost. Dame went to prison to protect Donnie, who never visited his friend while he was incarcerated, and got to live Dame’s dreams. Mary Anne concealed Dame’s letters from Donnie, hoping to protect him from associating with a convict. The mercurial vortex of shame, guilt, and resentment swirling between the two makes the Creed 3 final fight even better.
3 Jonathans Majors Is Creed 3’s Standout Acting Performance
Jonathan Majors’ workout and training for Creed 3 aside, he gives an incredibly nuanced performance to match the power of his punches. If Creed 3 was a silent film, viewers could track the trajectory of Dame’s narrative simply through his body language, which perfectly highlights his journey from an ex-con to a contender. As Dame morphs from a victim of circumstance to a world-recognized victor, there are many memorable moments, from the first awkward scene he shares with Donnie in the diner to the powerful one in the locker room, with special mention to the thousand-yard stare Majors mastered to play a man who has done time.
Viktor bore the shame of his father’s loss to Rocky while living in isolation in Ukraine, desperately training to one day regain glory for the Drago name. To his son, Ivan Drago was not a villain inRocky IV – he was simply a product of the USSR in the 1980s, and his minimal response to causing Apollo Creed’s death was a result of his dehumanization. Wrestling with the weight of his father’s tarnished legacy while having so many disadvantages compared to Donnie made for a compelling story, but Florian Munteanu did not give the same tortured performance Majors does, relying more on his physical presence to convey pain.
2 Dame Is A More Complex Villain Than Creed 2’s Drago
Dame is less of a black-and-white villain and more of a flawed human being with unresolved trauma in Creed 3, and Donnie is not depicted as a blameless protagonist in the trajectory of Dame’s life either. There is an almost Shakespearean sense of tragedy around the pair as their feud escalates, and that is why, even though he loses to Donnie in the end, Creed 3 is not the end of Dame’s story. After letting his need for revenge overshadow his life, Dame can let the past go and have a redemption arc that will bring him fulfillment now his mind is more at peace.
By contrast, Viktor was more of a cipher for his father’s anger and resentment and did not get the chance to express his own turmoil. A towering mountain stalking the ring and throwing monosyllabic taunts at Donnie, he was a manifestation of Ivan’s rage throughout the decades, but the grief and anguish never felt unique. Viktor put a younger Donnie in the hospital and in their following match, and it took 12 rounds for a healed Donnie to beat him, making Viktor less of an underdog and more of a juggernaut, lacking in complexity and nuance.
1 Creed 3’s Dame Is Fighting His Own Battle, While Drago Was Fighting His Father’s
Nowhere in the Rocky movie franchise has a villain been so well understood as Creed 3’s Dame, whose motivations not only make sense, but are easy to empathize with. While his methods for securing a match against Adonis Creed lack integrity, it is not hard to identify with his desperation. Dame feels his life has been stolen from him, his best friend betrayed him, and he is scared of Rocky’s adage, “Time takes everybody out. It’s undefeated.“ Dame knows that because of being in prison, he is at a disadvantage when it comes to becoming Heavyweight Champion of the World, and time is not on his side.
Viktor does not fight his own fight, but rather that of Ivan Drago in Creed 2, and his narrative does not get the breathing room to consider that his greatest opponent is himself. Viktor’s story is overshadowed by his father’s, as Ivan struggles to handle his wife and political connections abandoning him, leaving him to place all his hopes and failures into his son. If Viktor wants revenge against Dame for what he does to him in Creed 3, a sequel could provide great development for both characters.
