I don't care about Tommy Gunn at all and I don't want to see him fight. I'm glad Rocky whooped his ass.

A misstep. And it's flawed by a few production decisions. The misstep is the decision to take away virtually everything Rocky had gained in his journey so far. The flaws - the music being majority rap. The flashback to Mickey. The lack of nuance - everything is just so heavy-handed. One throughpoint of Stallone's career is that he at least understood what people wanted from their films. And he wrote for them rather than the critics... I can't think what Stallone was trying to do with this and whether it was lost in the edit as Rocky IV seemed to be... Who knows. I don't expect this one to get the later life Director's Cut like IV did. Once again though we get a mashup of what was going on in Stallone's world versus what was going on with the world at large. Tyson had emerged in the 5 years since IV and the rise/fall of Mike is mirrored somewhat in Tommy Gunn (Little did anyone know what reality had in store for Tommy just a few years later). And Stallone's own career stall was beginning to weigh on his thinking... A few years later he would recreate his persona and a decade & a half later he would go a long way to rectify this film as being the end of an anthology for the ages. Worst of the series for sure but Rocky has built up a huge amount of goodwill by this point that all is forgiven. 5.5/10

This would have been a good Rocky IV.

After the dissapointment of Rocky 4, this feels more like a Rocky movie again. Not focused on just the fight in the ring but mostly outside. Some of the Story is a bit too on the nose but this is the Rocky I like.

If the best revenge is living well, then apparently Drago got the last laugh as Rocky V finds Rocky Balboa bankrupt and suffering from permanent brain damage. After going bankrupt Rocky moves back to his old neighborhood in Philly and reopens Mickey’s gym, where he meets a young fighter named Tommy Gunn and becomes his manager. This is undoubtedly the worst of the Rocky films, making a fatal error on the direction to take the series. The film attempts to return Rocky to his roots, which isn’t a bad idea in concept (and worked well in Rocky III). But after Rocky’s triumphant victory over the Russians in Rocky IV, bankrupting and crippling him just serves to alienate the fans. And then there’s Tommy Gunn, the blandest, most uninteresting of all of Rocky’s foils. Rocky V scuttles the series and is one of those few films in a franchise that’s best forgotten, to be wiped out of existence as if it never happened.