In the same week that the restaurateur Will Ricker launched XO in Belsize Park, his fourth sequel to the immensely successful E&O in Notting Hill, the fifth Rocky sequel, Rocky Balboa, opened in Britain. And, what, you thought I wasn’t going to draw parallels? Boy, you really don’t know me.

Now, what these two “franchises” have in common (apart from the too much of a good thing thing) is that my feelings about them are at odds with prevailing national opinion: Will Ricker’s restaurants are popular with both punters and critics, but I’ve never liked them, while I consider the generally sneered-at Rocky films to be the best, the most important, the most human movies ever made.

The first one I saw was Rocky III in 1982, twice at the Swiss Cottage Odeon then at the Empire Leicester Square and then, when they invented videos, on video, night after night.

Obviously, it’s crap. But at 12, not having seen the first two, it changed my life: the training sequences, the terrifying Clubber Lang (played by Mr T in the days before The A-Team turned him into a larger version of Arnold from Diff’rent Strokes), the moving death of Mickey the trainer, the comeback, the revenge, the soundtrack.

Oh, the soundtrack. Eye of the Tiger by Survivor – with its tiger-striped paper sleeve (of course I bought it): Risin’ up, back on the street/ Did my time, took my chances/ Went the distance now I’m back on my feet/ Just a man and his will to survive... Nothing had ever seemed so lucidly relevant to the experience of a friendless pre-pubescent boy in boarding school. Apart from the Jennings books, maybe. And you couldn’t do chin-ups on the dorm door-lintel to Jennings.

Rocky, which I saw later on TV, was the real film, of course. The greatest ever. I still cry and cry. At Rocky’s respect for Apollo Creed, his determination not to let himself down, his love for Adrian, at the grey and rusty Philadelphia backdrop to his training runs, and most of all at the look of disbelief on Creed’s face when he knocks Rocky down in the 15th and starts waving to the crowd, assuming it is all over, only to see Rocky climb to his feet yet again and beckon him in for more with his raised and bloodied gloves.

Rocky II was almost as perfect, and even more weepy. Having begged the narrowly defeated Rocky not to take part in a rematch for the sake of his health, his wife Adrian goes into a coma after giving birth. Rocky prays at her bedside, night after night. And when she finally comes round and whispers, “There’s one thing I want you to do for me,” and Rocky leans in to hear her frail voice, and she says, “Win!”, I challenge any red-blooded man not to weep, first, and then, when the training theme strikes up, not to run out of the house immediately and sprint up a hill with a rucksack full of rocks.

But English film critics are not red-blooded. And that is why most of them didn’t get Rocky Balboa. They kvetched about believability, sneered at the sentimentality and mocked Stallone’s muscular, monosyllabic conception of masculinity. This is because English critics are a snide, whey-faced, nerdy bunch, who at the age when I was grinding out press-ups to Eye of the Tiger, were getting hard-ons for Belle de Jour and pinning another Morrissey poster to the wall.

American critics are not like that. It’s why they have Updike, Roth, Clint Eastwood, Joe DiMaggio and Champion the Wonder Horse while we have Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Hugh Grant, Mark Ramprakash and Muffin the Mule.

Sure, Rockys IV and V were very poor, but Rocky Balboa is without doubt the most moving, deftly handled and gorgeously cyclical sign-off of a sporting hero in sequential fiction since John Updike killed Harry Angstrom with a heart attack on a basketball court at the end of Rabbit at Rest.

No, it’s bigger than that. It is the most significant exit of any character from a heroic drama cycle since the Hostess reported the last moments of Falstaff in Henry V, saying: A’ parted ev’n just between twelve and one, ev’n at the turning o’ th’ tide.../ I knew there was but one way; for his nose was as sharp as a pen, and a’ babbled of green fields.

If you’re a man, and you have blood in your veins, then make sure you see Rocky Balboa. And if you’re a girl, go and have lunch at XO, it’s quite nice.

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