Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | July 15, 2026
Peter Farrelly, of Farrelly Bros. fame, is the brother who went out and made a drama after contemporary culture and relevance passed by his brand of comedy. That movie was Green Book. It was not good. The Academy awarded him a Best Picture win anyway. But the Oscar didn’t improve his brand of comedy, which is how we ended up with two of the worst films of the last several years, Ricky Stanicky and Balls Up.
Now Farrelly is taking another stab at drama, although based on the trailer, I Play Rocky may be the most unintentionally comedic movie of the year. It’s about Sylvester Stallone and the making of Rocky, and it’s turned into an inspirational true story nested inside the inspirational fictional one. They probably should have just called it Boomer.
Interestingly, Stallone himself is not involved. He is, however, played by a guy named Anthony Ippolito. And whatever it is that Stallone has, Ippolito decidedly does not. Stallone doesn’t do a lot for me (outside of Copland), but I’ll concede he has a certain quality that makes the whole mumbly-mouth thing work. When another guy does it? It just sounds like he has a frog in his throat.
The rest of the cast ain’t bad — AnnaSophia Robb, Tracy Letts, Jay Duplass, Stephan James, Toby Kebbell, and P. J. Byrne — and yet everything about I Play Rocky screams bad Peter Farrelly movie. Which is where the headline runs into trouble. I’d love to plant the flag and call this the first awards-season misfire of the year, except this is the man the Academy handed Best Picture to for Green Book, and this is the same year the Michael Jackson biopic made $1 billion. A frog-throated Stallone impression positioned for a Best Picture campaign shouldn’t work. Neither should half the things that already have. So you never know.
I Play Rock opens in theaters this November.
