THE DOG'S NAME IS PUNCHY. That's important if you pay attention. The names have always been important in the Rocky movie franchise. From the first "Yo, Adrian!" to all those guys he fought through so many sequels -- Apollo Creed, Clubber Lang, Thunderlips (a wrestler played by Hulk Hogan), the Soviet Uberman Ivan Drago, and in the most recent Rocky, Mason "The Line" Dixon. "Yo, Paulie! Your sister's with me." shouts Rocky out the window in the original no-last-name Rocky. In the same movie, Rocky had three pets: two turtles called Cuff and Link, and a huge mastiff named Buttkiss, which is how the name Butkus sounds when you say it out loud. The dog was name after Dick Butkus, the Hall of Fame linebacker from the Chicago Bears, considered to be the most punishing tackler in the NFL.

In the new Rocky with-surname movie, Cuff and Link still live without being named. Thirty years later they are the size of healthy pond turtles now swimming in the aquarium tank toward where Rocky feeds them, which is to say that Cuff is now the size of a Cadillac and Link is a Continental. And Buttkiss, the prize dog from the pet shop, has been replaced by Punchy, the mutt Rocky saves from the Erie Avenue death chambers, where unloved mongrels go to either find new homes or breathe their last.

The signature shot in the movie Rocky Balboa, as it was in the original Rocky, is the scene of the past-prime pugilist doing post-workout victory dance on top of the Art Museum steps overlooking Center City. But what the movie poster doesn't show that the movie does (above) is that Rocky is holding Punchy in his arms as his fist pumps toward the snow-flecked sky over his home town.

Punchy holding Punchy while celebrating a comeback. It was no accident that Sylvester Stallone staged that scene. Punchy is a transparent metaphor for Rocky, the fictional character who had been hit in the head once too often by a bad sequel, and a metaphor for the past-peak action movie career of Rocky's creator. Had that scene, had not the entire movie, been pulled off just right -- and by that I mean dead center in the heart and gut -- audiences would have laughed at Rocky Balboa and critics would have torn Stallone seventeen new names for hasbeen.

In that scene Stallone announces to the world that Rocky and Punchy are running on fumes. Can this mangey mutt of an overwrought sequel-battered franchise rise to the occasion? Can it return, recover, re-introduce the loveable, believable guy from the neighborhood named Rocky Balboa. Could this movie take us back to the original?

Take you back. . .do, do, doo, do. . .Take you baaack! Is it possible?

In a word, abzolutely.

The movie Rocky Balboa takes us back to the original feeling the first time we met the thick tongued poet from the corner, the bruiser who wore his heart on his sleeve and in his eyes, the mumbler who said the sweetest things in the weirdest ways. Thirty years later Stallone's Rocky is wiser, lonlier, more human. Thirty years later Philadelphia has never looked uglier or more beautiful than in the startling yet familiar views of the city. "You spend enough time in a place," Rocky tells Paulie fondly, "you become that place."

The amazing thing about Rocky Balboa, the movie, is the acting. Burt Young's Paulie is almost tender, especially when he calls the aging Rocky by his pet name, Rocco. Geraldine Hughes' chaste substitute-Adrian love interest opens all the right emotional doors. Milo Ventimiglia, who plays Rocky's 30-year-old son, has been described by some critics as money-obsessed and weasely, but he seemed to be an authentic conflicted adult child of a famous father. Even real life boxer Antonio Tarver delivers a nuanced convincing performance as an unappreciated champion, unlike the cartoonish heavyweight villains Apollo Creed and Clubber Lang played by Carl Weathers and Mr. T.

But it's Stallone's movie, and he makes Rocky at 60 seem as real as the character he created at 30. This Rocky has been hurt by life but his spirit, his eternal innocence, is bruised yet intact. He is a wiser, lonlier Rocky. But his spirit is the same as the man we first met, the man who wanted to go the distance and who proved that the distance isn't over until he says it's over, the man unafraid to go toe-to-toe with whatever life's got to throw at him.